I'm buying a laptop running Windows 10 as a portable video-editing workstation running Premiere Pro CC. The laptop comes with the following: 480 GB Corsair M510 M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 SSD as the boot drive, a slot for a second M.2 PCIe SSD, 16 MB RAM, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU. So at the time of this post, this isn't a top-notch video-editing machine -- but it's affordable and capable, and I want to apply the price difference between this and a more-premium laptop to adding a second SSD.With two internal SDs, my objectives are to avoid the inconvenience of external drives for wire-free portability, while ensuring smooth playback, along with above-average rendering and export speeds -- i.e. much faster than but not necessarily the fastest compared to HDD -- for 1080p and sometimes 4k video projects. I typically also run Photoshop and a web browser when working on video projects.For the second SSD, I'm leaning toward a 2 TB option with equal or better performance specs than the boot-drive SSD.I routinely clear cached files, archive older projects and media files to external storage, and only store project and media files for a handful of current projects on my laptop at a given time. I look forward to your recommendations regarding how to allocate files across two internal SSDs based on the specs and objectives I provided above! Here are a couple options I'm considering -- including partitioning the second SSD to take advantage of three drives without needing an external drive, if that will increase performance with enough SSD storage headroom and is worth the trouble. SSD 1 (boot drive, 480 GB): Premiere Pro program files. SSD 2 (1 TB): project files, source media files, media cache files, scratch disks.SSD 1: program files. SSD 2 partition 1 (1 TB): project files, source media files. SSD 2 partition 2 (1 TB): media cache files, scratch disks.

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Optimizing 2 internal SSDs for Premiere Pro CC on a laptop

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
March 13, 2021
5 replies
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I'm buying a laptop running Windows 10 as a portable video-editing workstation running Premiere Pro CC. The laptop comes with the following: 480 GB Corsair M510 M.2 NVMe PCIe Gen 3 SSD as the boot drive, a slot for a second M.2 PCIe SSD, 16 MB RAM, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GPU. So at the time of this post, this isn't a top-notch video-editing machine -- but it's affordable and capable, and I want to apply the price difference between this and a more-premium laptop to adding a second SSD.

With two internal SDs, my objectives are to avoid the inconvenience of external drives for wire-free portability, while ensuring smooth playback, along with above-average rendering and export speeds -- i.e. much faster than but not necessarily the fastest compared to HDD -- for 1080p and sometimes 4k video projects. I typically also run Photoshop and a web browser when working on video projects.
For the second SSD, I'm leaning toward a 2 TB option with equal or better performance specs than the boot-drive SSD.
I routinely clear cached files, archive older projects and media files to external storage, and only store project and media files for a handful of current projects on my laptop at a given time.

I look forward to your recommendations regarding how to allocate files across two internal SSDs based on the specs and objectives I provided above! Here are a couple options I'm considering -- including partitioning the second SSD to take advantage of three drives without needing an external drive, if that will increase performance with enough SSD storage headroom and is worth the trouble.

SSD 1 (boot drive, 480 GB): Premiere Pro program files. SSD 2 (1 TB): project files, source media files, media cache files, scratch disks.
SSD 1: program files. SSD 2 partition 1 (1 TB): project files, source media files. SSD 2 partition 2 (1 TB): media cache files, scratch disks.

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Peru Bob

Community Expert

However, if anyone can recommend an easy-to-use tool for testing Adobe Premiere reads and writes
By @Koshu

Here:

https://exchange.adobe.com/creativecloud.details.105878.html

KoshuAuthor

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Thank you, sir!

KoshuAuthor

Participating Frequently

This morning I found this "Optimizing your system for Premiere Pro and After Effects" article in the Adobe Knowledge Base: https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/hardware-recommendations.html. The article, last published on April 20, 2020, states:

The best way to achieve excellent performance (and to keep different types of files organized) is to spread the load between multiple drives. An optimal setup has three drives:
System drive for OS and applications
Drive for the media cache
Media drive (or shared storage)
Only have two drives? Use a fast external drive for your media and Media Cache.

But, since the article doesn't specifically address drive partitioning, I raised this topic on Adobe Support chat. Frankly, I had to work a bit to try to get clear answers, and the discussion broadened to include whether or not using one SSD vs. multiple drives is optimal -- but in any case, here are the most-relevant takeaways from the chat:

ME ("Koshu"): "So just so that I'm clear in my understanding -- it's appropriate to 1) use the 'media cache' drive for media cache files as well as scratch disks; 2) use the 'media' drive for source media files imported into projects, the projects themselves, and exported encoded media files; and 3) use the 2 TB SSD as either a combined 'media' and 'media cache' drive, or partition that SSD into separate 'media' and 'media cache' drives, and performance should be relatively optimized whether or not I partition -- is this correct?"

ADOBE: "Yes I understand that we would like to inform you that application is designed in such a way it selects the media cache file automatically to default location which you can change later if you want. And for media files you can either keep in the internal drive or external drive same way you can save project in the external or internal drive its just like if you keep those in the internal drive like C drive, documents, desktop it will give optimized performance."

ME: "[I]f I'm correctly understanding what you just clarified: even though multiple drives can be used, because of how the Adobe CC applications are currently designed, performance will be optimized with similar performance regardless of the choice of how many drives are used (including use of just an internal / C: drive) and how the various application, project, and media files are assigned to those drives?"

ADOBE: "Yes, we can keep files on multiple drives. This will not effect application performance."

ME: "OK, so with the current Adobe CC applications, is there still an advantage to using multiple drives, or is using a single drive, especially if high capacity SSD, enough for optimized performance, especially for 4K or higher resolution projects?"

ADOBE: "Yes, You can keep the 4K files on SSD drive and it will work. fine."

So, according to Adobe Support, notwithstanding the recommendations in the Knowledge Base article, Premiere Pro, After Effects and other CC applications are now designed for "optimized" performance whether using multiple drives or rocking one high-capacity SSD to rule them all, with or without drive partitioning.

However, if anyone can recommend an easy-to-use tool for testing Adobe Premiere reads and writes, to go with observing rendering / export times, I might test and compare performance of 1 SSD, 2 SSDs, and 2 SSDs partitioned, then report back.

John T Smith

Community Expert

The only thing I have is the MINIMUM https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/system-requirements.html

I build my own, and I don't like just one SSD - so I have clearly set file locations

For example, what I have (home built Jan 2021) Windows 10, currently at version 20H2
Intel i9-10900k CPU in ASUS-Prime-Z490-P motherboard with 64Gig TEAMGROUP-3200MHz Ram
Seagate-FireCuda 500Gig M.2 for Windows and programs and usual Documents files
500Gig SSD for temporary and output files, 1T SSD for video and picture input files
Video card MSI GeForce GTX 1650 128 Bit Graphics 4Gig GDDR6 Ram + a DVD drive

KoshuAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for sharing, John: sounds like a very capable system!

I'm definitely going to use both SSDs in my laptop, since it's a no-brainer to use all 2.5 TB and using multiple drives is tried and true. That said, I found additional info related to this topic in the Adobe Knowledge Base, and also had a discussion with a pair of Adobe reps using support chat, which I'll discuss in my next comment below.

John T Smith

Community Expert

When I was buying components I wanted an RTX2060 with 6Gig to be sure of smooth
timeline playback... I had to buy a GTX1650 with 4Gig because nobody had the 2060
in stock... My 4k test didn't have any timeline 'glitches' so I didn't need the 2060

Sample 4k video - H.264 and HEVC inside an MP4 work... HEVC inside an ENCM won't play or load
https://4ksamples.tumblr.com/

John T Smith

Community Expert

I am going to GUESS that it is different with an SSD, but I read a long time ago that partitioning a platter drive lowered performance, since a platter drive has one read/write head so moving from P1 to P2 caused a physical data reading delay, especially if doing something had involved 'quickly' moving between files on the two partitions

But... I really don't know if there is a performance reduction on an SSD with 2 partitions

KoshuAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you for weighing in, John.

I did some more digging within the Community here, and found this thread in the Photoshop forum: https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/setting-scratch-disk-to-same-hard-drive-as-operating/m-p/10810319. That thread, as of today, is less than two years old, and the prevailing opinion is there's no need in general to partition an SSD or use multiple SSDs (assuming the single SSD has ample storage capacity) -- let alone for Photoshop. I can't speak for those who weighed in, but based on how unequivocal the prevailing opinion is, I'd assume they'd say the same for Premiere Pro. In particular, D Fosse states:

Put everything on a large system drive. With SSDs, that's the most efficient setup and the best performance. Don't partition, it does nothing for performance, if anything the opposite. It would only be for housekeeping purposes.

The separate scratch drive is a thing of the past. It applied to spinning hard drives with a read/write head that could only be in one place at a time.

EDIT: seemingly conflicting advice here, but I stand by what I wrote. This is also in line with the official recommendations from Adobe.

Do you know where these "official recommendations from Adobe" reside? (I asked D Fosse for a link as well.)

Peru Bob

Community Expert

Moved to the Video Hardware forum.

KoshuAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thank you, Peru Bob.

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