Hello, I need help on the Hardware side of Media & Cache in After Effects

[strawbarry]

Hello, I wanted to know about the Hardware side of the Media & Cache in After Effects

I will basically be working with 4K Log Footage and Tons of layers. I'll be working with a 5700x, RTX 4080, 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM and I have a sole 1TB M.2 for my operating system (where I have Adobe Softwares installed).

My questions are about caching, I was thinking of getting this seperate Samsung PM9A1 2TB M.2 Gen 4 NVMe SSD (R&W Speeds are 7000 MB/s Read and 5200 MB/s Write).

• 1.  Is it okay to partition this and use it whole for both Caching and Storing Project Files? Will it become slow because everything is being done on the same drive?
• 2. Or should I store all my footage on this (bcz I mainly wanna store 4K files on it and don't wanna waste storage space if it is overkill) and I can dedicate a spare 500 GB ssd for caching (which is 540 MB/s Read and 520 MB/s Write)

Thanks in Advance!

[Mylenium]

Partitioning SSDs is pretty much a pointless exercise to begin with due to how they work. Other than providing another virtual drive to make things look organized this bears no influence on performance or actual data writing. So in the end it doesn't matter. Only an actual separate SSD will make a difference, but even then you may have to consider how it's hooked up to your PCI bus.

Mylenium 

[Warren Heaton]

Since 2019, I've been working from 4TB Flash storage that does 2,400+- MB/s writes and 2,800+- MB/s reads for OS, Applications, and Media Cache and an 8TB external Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD that does 1,900 +- writes ands 1,700 MB/s reads four projects, source footage, and renders with no complaints.

Issues come up now and again, but After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator all run extremely well.

From 2013 to 2018, it was a 1TB Flash storage with 10 GigaBIT SAN.  No complaints then either.

[֑nubnubbud]

None of this will help quite as much as buying more RAM and waiting for it to cache, then playing it back. If it won't play back at a proper speed when cached... thems the breaks and you might want to look at some cheaper, newer alternatives for VFX. It sounds to me you probably want a program that can take advantage of your beefy GPU and isn't a RAM hog, so davinci resolve is a good start- it's free for 4k UHD outputs. I like Nuke, and it has better VFX features than resolve, but it costs a pretty penny.

You could also try turning off hyperthreading or even setting your swap space/page file to better handle overflow from RAM, and making sure your cache is in the drive closest to your CPU, and if only some slots are full, the 2 and 4 slots are usually faster when the others are empty