Adobe Premiere Relink Media on SMB Share - 2025/2025 Speed Difference

Hi Adobe Team,

I’ve run into a significant performance issue with the new Premiere Pro 2026 (v26.0.1) regarding media relinking over SMB, which seems to be a clear regression compared to the 2025 (2025.6.4) version.

The Issue

In Premiere Pro 2025, the initial relink/indexing of a large project (multiple TBs) takes some time, but once the metadata is cached, subsequent launches are fast, but still takes some unnecessary time. 

In Premiere Pro 2026, this "warm-up" benefit is gone. Every single time I open the project, Premiere spends the same full duration relinking and scanning the media. It’s as if the application is failing to commit the file-path metadata to the local cache or is forcing a deep re-scan on every launch, regardless of whether the files have moved.

My Setup

I’ve tested this thoroughly on a high-end setup to rule out hardware bottlenecks:

• Clients: New Mac Studio M4 Max (14/40-cores), 128GB RAM.

• Network: 10GbE to clients, 100GbE uplink to the switch.

• Configuration: MTU 9000 (Jumbo Frames) enabled throughout.

• Storage: All-NVMe QNAP and TrueNAS (SMB shares).

Test Results & Observations

• Initial Scan: Both 2025 and 2026 take roughly the same time for the first scan.

• Subsequent Launches: 2025 drops to just a 15-20 seconds. 2026 stays at the original slow speed (several minutes for large projects).

• Cache Clear: Clearing the media cache resets 2025 to the "slow" state (as expected), but after one run, it’s fast again. 2026 never gets faster.

Has anyone an idea?