How to bypass Adobe's hand-holding and move your disk cache to an external drive
Under Preferences -> Media & Disk Cache, you have the option of choosing the folder where your disk cache and conformed media will be stored. Unfortunately, Adobe thinks we are hapless teenagers who cannot make good decisions, and if you try to select a location outside of an internal hard drive you will be greeted with the error "The location you have chosen is on an external drive" and be asked to choose again, out of concern for performance.
This is 2021 and there are many external storage options that surpass the performance of internal drives. Or maybe you're like me and have internal M.2 PCIe cards that just happen to be recognized as external drives by fluke of the system drivers. In any case, there is a way around this silliness, and on macOS it's by way of symlinks.
- Open Terminal and type in ln -s. Don't press enter yet.
- Drag the folder on your external drive onto Terminal
- Drag the current directory selected in the AE preferences window onto Terminal (usually /Users/<username>/LIbrary/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache and similar), then delete it
- Press enter
- Terminal will create a symbolic link to your new folder in place of the one After Effects is currently using. AE will be none the wiser.
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