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kresimirk39695749
Known Participant
January 28, 2023
Question

AE using c: drive / how much space does it need on system drive?

  • January 28, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 2247 views

Hi,

 

Since there seems to be no way to stop AE from eating the c: drive (moving cache and temp files to another drive does not help), can someone recommend how much free space should I have free on c: for AE to function smoothly, and without worrying about its space?

 

AE eats 10GB of space within 2 minutes on c: (even though it is set specifically to use space on another drive hence) so I am left under the impression that it will eat a TB of data in an hour. What the hell guys? I imagine that is not the case, but not sure.

 

I am about to buy a drive and redo my entire PC drives structure due to AE's apetite for c: drive. So would appreciate a tip, thanks!

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3 replies

Mylenium
Mylenium
Legend
January 30, 2023

I don't think AE will eat up your whole drive. At some point it will more likely simply crash because the file I/O becomes too heavy and it can't keep track of it. This is some weird memory leak somewhere, but there's only so much we can do to diagnose this on a forum. It could even simply go away just from getting a bigger drive because whatever process is causing this suddenly has more room to do its thing.

 

Mylenium

    K
    kresimirk39695749Author
    Known Participant
    January 30, 2023

    I imagine thinking that it would eat up 1TB for such a side issue is going over the top with worries. So I'll just throw a TB drive at the problem to not think about it again, for a while. Much appreciate your help again Mylenium.

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    January 28, 2023

    You could check resource monitor. Click on AfterFX.exe and enable filtering for this process, then see which directories it's writing to. If that doesn't offer any clues, download Microsoft/ Sysinternals Process Explorer and check the activity there.

     

    Mylenium

    K
    kresimirk39695749Author
    Known Participant
    January 30, 2023

    Sadly it does not give me any clues to solve the issue. It only shows some minor usage, nothing that would point out to 5-10 GB losses of space on c:

     

    Appreciate all your time put into debigging my issues Mylenium, but I will just order a new drive and solve it with a raw solution like that. Feeling pretty bitter about AE atm as this was the first time to run into such issue on the PC.

     

    Are you able to tell me if a new 1TB SSD for my C: could potentially within hours fill up all 1TB and have me run into the same problem? This stealthy drainage of space on C: is really a concern since it eats 10GB within minutes. So at that rate even if I buy a 1TB drive just for this stealthy drainage, I feel like it will just take an hour to get my PC to fail again.

     

    Thanks,

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    January 28, 2023

    In theory AE doesn't really need any more space on your C:\ drive once you have successfully moved your temp and cache folders. This is kind of the point. It's more likely that this is caused by the CC Library and other related stuff. At the end of the day only keenly observing task manager/ resource monitor can really tell you which process is gobbling up all that storage. That said, I read the other day that 1 TB costs now less than 50 Euro and you can apparently get 2 TB NVMe drives pretty easily. So buy the best drive you can afford in that range.

     

    Mylenium

    K
    kresimirk39695749Author
    Known Participant
    January 28, 2023

    Hi Mylenium,

     

    Just checked CC Library and whatever else I could find on CC, and I do not see any other options for data usage (other then just install locations, and file syncing location). My CC Library is empty too. It was a clean CC install with only After Effects. 

     

    Is this a clue to the potential issue: when I launch AE and open a bare minimum project (1x 180MB video and 100KB PNG), my c: drive is unaffected. But when I press play, it immidiately wipes out 5GB from c:

     

    And yes I am getting very close to needing to restructure my drives with or without AE issue. Still I would delay it as much as possible as there's a lot to reinstall.

     

    Thanks,

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