Need advice on Hard drive allocation

[Joolsey1973]

Hello. I have been doing a lot of 4K motion graphics in AE and PR for that matter. 

I am finding AE really laggy and I can mostly put it down to the read-write performace of outdated USB external drives. Plus the small amount of space on the only SSD I have on my PC. 

After-effects has some improvments with render files caching in the background.

My PC is a few years old, pretty aveage but certainly not unusable: 

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz, 3192 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)

Nvida 1080 graphics card.

I am looking to buy some sort of SSD to work with to make editing a bit more fluid.. 

At the moment I have: 

237 SSD as a system drive. 

D drive is one TB HDD, which is full of flight sim files which is massive. 

And I have these external USB drives that have space but are very slow. 

At the moment it seems to work best when I work from the USB drive but have the C drive as a disk cache. This isn't ideal I know so I was wondering what I should do. This isn't great as it is the system drive. 

Should I get another SSD and work from that plus use it as a disc cach? Are you meant to have the disc cache separate from the working files? What do you find works best. 

Which is better? An internal SATA SSD or external SATA USB3.0 SSD? Are these options any different?

Thank you in advance

Julian

[ShiveringCactus]

You're definitely asking the right question.  An SSD drive is the way to go for your cache.  But the factors involved in internal vs external aren't just write speed.  Is the external drive hooked up via usb2 or 3, is it a genuine usb3 etc...  You don't mention RAM, but that's the biggest improvement you can see.

I was "brought up" to believe internal drives are better and faster, but I have a feeling that's an old way of thinking.

[Joolsey1973]

Thanks for the reply. Yes,  I think I have a fair bit of RAM. I try not to have other apps open whilst using AE.

Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
Total Physical Memory 31.8 GB
Available Physical Memory 22.6 GB
Total Virtual Memory 41.8 GB
Available Virtual Memory 29.0 GB