iMac 27-inch Disk Upgrades and Configuration for Premiere and After Effects

[John Young]

I am currently deep into researching a new machine of my own so hopefully some of this knowledge I have acquired can be useful to you.

The single biggest boost to your system would be a Adobe certified GPU so you could use the accelerated Mercury Playback Engine. But from what I have found, that is not possible on an iMac. In fact the only Apple option for the MPE is a modified Mac Pro. (That is why I am probably switch from Mac to PC for this system).

Other than that, you hard drive configuration can help. You want to avoid reading and writing to the same drive at the same time. For me, it helps to think of it in terms of a Program Drive, a Source Drive, and a Render Drive. I think the optimal Hard Drive situation is :

Program Drive – Solid State Drive – for OS and programs only (240GB should be enough space) The research that I have done suggests that SSDs are not ideal for media storage and have not proven their reliability yet.

Source Drive- 1TB Internal. This would be for media you are actively using. Ideally this would be a RAID system, but you can configure some sort of backup system if your internal drive cannot have a RAID configuration.

Render Drive – Internal. This doesn’t need to be gigantic in size, but having it separate from your Source drive will really speed things up.

Storage Drive – External 1TB RAID. I would use this as an output drive and to store media that you are not actively working on.

I am not a computer expert, but I have been researching this stuff for two weeks now and feel like I have a bit of a grasp on this.
Some links that I have found helpful.
Premiere Pro Benchmark Resultshttps://ppbm5.com/index.html
Adobe Forums- Hardware https://forums.adobe.com/community/premiere/hardware_forum
Hope it helps.

John

[Wes Browning]

After discussions with my local Apple authorized service center, I came to the conclusion that the best configuration I could get in my iMac was a 240gb internal SSD and a 1tb internal SATA HDD drive.

The service center wouldn’t do two SSD drives since it wasn’t a supported configuration. They also wouldn’t upgrade the 1tb drive to a 3tb drive without an Apple hard drive. Since Apple upgrades are twice, sometimes three times more than buying the parts off the shelf, I decided to keep the configuration stated above. They could upgrade the HDD, but doing so would result in disabling the fan control embedded in the Apple’s HDD firmware. That meant the fan would run all the time, which would get annoying after a while.

With the above system, I’m adding a 4tb RAID-0 external drive connected by an eSata/Thunderbolt adapter from Sonnet (https://bit.ly/tQ7eSB). It seems this will give my external drive speeds between 1.5Gbps and 2.5Gbps. I’m not sure how this configuration will work since there’s no documentation on this setup, but will know when I do some speed tests.

With this setup, I plan on using these drives as follows…
– SSD: Operating System & Programs
– Internal 1 TB: Previews, Media Cache, Exports
– External 4 TB RAID: Media, Projects

[Roger Burton]

Hi Wes … how’s the new system going, I have a similar requirement, quite lightweight after effects use and am debating between iMac 27-inch 3.1GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 and Mac pro (but I need the new mac soon and don’t really have the funds for the Mac Pro) – thanks if you can help. Roger

[Wes Browning]

Hi Roger-

I ended up with the 27-inch (Mid 2011) 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7. It’s been a great machine for light to medium After Effects use. And of course Premiere screams with this setup.

I didn’t upgrade the hard disk because the firmware Apple installs to it is impossible to put on other hard disks. That firmware is what controls the iMac fans. I’m told if you’re okay with the fans running all the time, which sounds like a jet engine, then upgrade the hard disk to whatever you need. I opted for an external eSata/Thunderbolt RAID (see below) instead.

Here’s my setup…

BASIC CONFIGURATION
27-inch, Mid 2011 iMac
Processor 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB (the 2gb upgrade that Apple offers)

DRIVES
System/Applications: 240 GB OCZ-VERTEX3 SSD
Render/File Exports: Internal Seagate Barracuda 7200 SATA 3Gb/s 1TB Hard Drive (Apple installed)
Media Source Files: OWC Mercury Elite Pro RAID with 2 Seagate Barracuda 2 TB 7200RPM 3.5″ Sata Hard Drives connected via eSata to Thunderbolt

THUNDERBOLT ADAPTER
Sonnet Echo Expresscard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter with Sonnet Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34 eSata card (https://bit.ly/zKfJQA and https://bit.ly/zKfJQA)

My thunderbolt RAID adapter setup gets me satisfactory results. I’m getting write speeds of 60 MB/s and read speeds of 115 of MB/s. By comparison, my internal 1TB hard drive mentioned above is getting write speeds of 80 MB/s and read speeds of 107 MB/s.

Hope this helps!

[Wes Browning]

I should add that the 16gb RAM is what’s key to my Premiere and After Effects speed. I got the 16gb RAM for $100, but you could go as high as 32gb RAM if you’re willing to shell out around $500.

[Dorian Mattar]

You could have used fan control software at a cost of $29. I’ve installed it and it works perfectly.