Premiere Pro takes extremely long time loading and "relinking" clips when media is on a NAS over SMB
Hi,
I'm using Premiere Pro 25.2.3 on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra (128 GB RAM) with Mac OS Sequoia 15.4.1. I use a QNAP NAS (3088XU-RP) wired over 25 GbE SFP28 cabling. My read/write speeds exceed 2000 MB/Sec over SMB.
I began a new project recently (as a Premiere Production) with approximately 100 hours of footage, all processed to proxies as ProRes Proxy codec within Premiere. There are approximately 900 clips in the project that contains our media within the Production. When accessed over SMB, Premiere Pro takes upwards of 10+ minutes to fully load the project. Specifically on the background task of "relinking" every time the project is opened. Once everything is finally loaded the performance is fine.
But when I move all that media to an external SSD (APFS formatted) or even an iSCSI volume from the same NAS (effectively just a block level APFS volume over the network), Premiere Pro loads this project and completes the background "relinking" task is 5 seconds or less. So I am concluding that this is clearly a problem with how Premiere is accessing files over SMB protocol, at least with Mac OS.
This is a very troubling issue, since using share folders over SMB on my NAS allows me to collaborate locally with multiple systems, and is the very purpose of owning a NAS in a post production environment. I cannot speak to if this issue has occured with earlier versions of Premiere, but it must be fixed! Thank you for your time.
Best,
JD Marlow
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