Question about scratch discs and media cache..

I use Premiere. Photoshop, and would like to learn more in Illustrator.…It does have 2 more m.2 PCIe Gen 3 slots (3600mb/s). I want to use it for a scratch disc should I also put media cash on the same drive or shall I get two separate drives I'm not sure how much one affects the other etc and what size I should buy 512GB, 1TB or 2TB.

By @GrimTim1980

A lot depends on where your work is along the spectrum between “casual” and “pro/intensive.”

If you’re a casual user, you might get away with the minimum of assigning Photoshop scratch and Premiere Pro media cache to a single 512GB SATA SSD. This could be enough for short Premiere Pro video sequences with a few tracks, and Photoshop files that are not a lot of megapixels and only a few layers. Or as D Fosse said you could leave them on the system volume…if it has the room for you to always keep several hundred GB free.

The more intensive your work is, the more you probably want scratch/caches to use the speed and capacity of at least one separate m.2 SSD that is at least 1TB.

If you are doing the most intensive level of work in both Photoshop and video applications, then you might consider assigning Photoshop scratch to one m.2 SSD, and Adobe media cache to another m.2 SSD, both at least 1TB each. Adobe Media Cache is shared by Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Media Encoder. What I mean by intensive work is program-length Premiere Pro sequences with lots of video and audio tracks (like a TV episode or feature film), and high-megapixel Photoshop files with lots of layers, masks, effects, and Smart Objects.

If you start getting into After Effects, it also has a Disk Cache that can grow to several hundred gigabytes on its own too.

This sounds pretty much like the machine I put together last month.

I can't speak for Premiere Pro, but for Photoshop I would leave the scratch disk on the system drive. That's where you get the best performance. Especially since this is PCIe 4.0 and the other two m.2 slots 3.0, that speed difference can be noticeable. With 1 TB total you should be covered for most practical purposes, but assign secondary scratch to one of the other m.2's just to have overflow space in case.

Again speaking for Photoshop, the RTX 3060 I put in seems almost overkill. It's obviously orders of magnitude faster than the old Quadro P2200 I had before, and all GPU intensive operations are absolutely instant. When I open the case and look, the fans aren't even running most of the time (yes, they do work).

But then, you might need some extra horsepower for Premiere.

Moved to the Video hardware forum.

@RjL190365