-
Scratch disk location for Premiere Pro & After Effects on a single drive laptop?
Hi Creative Cow,
I’m wondering if anybody can answer a few questions I have about best practice for scratch disks, when using Premiere Pro and After Effects on a single SSD drive laptop.
I’ve been shopping around for a laptop to replace my desktop editing rig, as it’s getting a bit old (built in 2014). My question is; do I have to get a laptop with a secondary internal drive – in keeping with practice of keeping the software, footage and temp files in different locations/drives? Or can I just buy a laptop with a single SSD and put the footage and temp files on a 7200rpm, external drive that plugs into the laptop? What do you laptop editors do? Does this practice even matter these days, with all the advancements in recent years? Any advice regarding the scratch disk location will be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
PS, if this information helps: I’m looking at a good bang-for-buck Ryzen 5 5600H Windows laptop, with an RTX 3050ti graphics card and 16 GB of ram, and a 512GB SSD. I’ll be editing mainly HD and occasional 4K material, mainly short form work. (The Mac M1 machines are superb, but are just a little too pricey for me!)
Thanks again,
Pete
-
5 Replies
-
The main thing is that nvme technology has exploded in size and shrunk in cost, so I would forget the whole ssd thing and get a nvme drive. you can get a nvme 1TB sabrent for a hundred bucks at 3500MB/s. Then, if you need larger storage, an external ssd. make sure the motherboard has 3.2 gen 2 usb slots.
-
For your needs, 1 x 500 GB SSD for OS, Apps and Media Cache is modest and more than good for short format HD and occasional 4K workflow. If you work on long formats, multiple layers, heavy graphics and multiple Apps, 1TB SSD or 2 x 500 SSD is preferable. OS Apps and Cache could be on the same drive so long as your work flow is not choking the memory. Once the OS starts paging file, you are in trouble.
Santanu,
http://www.santanu.biz -
Thank you so much for the advice Chris and Santanu!
I’m looking at getting a laptop configured by a company in South Africa that builds gaming machines (best bang-for-buck), and I’ll make sure that the specs you recommend are included in the build. I’m currently looking at different builds for the Lenovo Legion 5, and the HP Victus 16.
Best regards,
Pete
-
Hey Pete,
Very good advice from Chris and Santanu.
I got a #HP #ZBook Pro 17′ G6 Mobile Workstation running a i9 Intel processor, with a 500 GB SSD for boot drive, and a 2 TB SSD for media (The Workstation can carry up to 10 TB of internal SSD). And, a NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000.
One of the best things I did, was to beef the memory up to 64 GB (still space to expand to 128 GB).
The 64 GB, combined with SSD drives, has made a huge difference to my work with Premiere Pro and After Effects. When I’m running short on space, I use an external Samsung T7 drive (USB 3 / 1050 Mbps).
My added advice to the above, would be for you to have at least 32 GB of memory. More if you have the funds.
-
Thanks so much for the advice Mads.
I will get 32 GB of RAM and a fast external drive – I know it will be worth it, even though budget is a bit tight at the moment! Your ZBook machine sounds amazing BTW.
Thanks people of The Cow – I know I can always find answers from the industry pros here.
Best Regards,
Pete
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up