Best Drive Setup for After Effects Performance (Post-Production Powerhouses)

Question

Hey everyone,What’s the optimal drive setup for running After Effects as smoothly as possible?I’d love to hear best practices from those working in post-production powerhouses.My current setup (maxed-out MacBook Pro):Media & Disk Cache: External SSDAssets & Project Files: Same external SSDI focused on fast transfer speeds but didn’t think much beyond that. Is this the best setup, or should project files, assets, and cache be on separate drives?For those of you working in high-end post-production (editors, VFX artists, 3D artists, animators),what’s the most efficient way to structure drive usage for smooth AE performance?Would appreciate any insights.

Shebbe · Answer

The ideal setup would be that media/diskcache has it's own drive so it never has to interfere with read or write speeds of the disk where data is read and written to.

It is also best to have a very fast disk for cache. What kind of SSD are you talking about. SATA or NVMe? And how is it connecting to the Macbook?

If you have plenty of internal storage it would be best to reserve a bit of that for cache because that's definitely fast. I would split the drive in two partitions that have their own disk size so you always know how much you have for normal data on your machine and prevent filling up the entire drive.

Depending on the kind of media you work with I'd say about 300GB for cache is enough so that could be set as limit inside AE prefs. But how much you want to allocate may depend on how much you can spare on your macbook.

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