Scratch drive question (new set up)

[Mz Creative]

Most of my work is in Element 3d these days. I utilize the preview a lot since I build a monster to handle everything, but I have a question

I've been 'out of the game' for years now. probably 4. Previously I needed to worry about the speed of my scratch drive, so the solution then was I bought a 500gb drive to use and dedicated it to scratch.

Is this still of that much importance? i'm asking because I can pick up one of those Samsung 970 EVO Plus drives pretty cheap. Less than $70 and I already have the card. it's as fast as you're going to get.

So my questions are.

1. is this worth doing since I am not sure these days?

2. if so, would you get a 250 or 500gb model if price wasn't a huge issue?

Or am I going way overboard on something that won't much matter?

[dj.summitt · Accepted solution]

Ideally, you would have three drives, all SSD.
1. Scratch
2. Project Files
3. Export Location

To answer your first question, yes.
For your second, my scratch drive is a 1TB but I also use it for C4D particle caching which can get pretty hefty. 500GB would do fine.

[Mz Creative]

This is exactly how I was thinking. I'm actually running a raid 6 with 8 SAS drives for one of the drives which is better in my case than an  SSD and it sounds like the m2 is the right drive for scratch. but my BIOS is too old to boot to something like the EVO plus so I'll stay here. I get a solid 1GBps throughput.

1TB is a LOT of scratch drive. i thought i was overdoing it with 500gb.

Thanks for the confirmation!

the really nice part is with sata4 being announced and the falling prices things are about to really get cheaper if you stay one step behind on purchasing (which i do because i don't like to waste money)

[Mz Creative]

Actually, I went back and picked up an envy drive 1tb because I found it for $115 and got some heat sinks. so i'm excited right now!

Thanks for the info! helped a ton!

[Mylenium]

Or am I going way overboard on something that won't much matter?

Well, you might. Perhaps it might help to carify terminology a little: AE barely uses your system's scratch drive, but of course it has a dedicated caching system. Therefore your system's "scratch drive"/ swap file doesn't really matter. Whether or not the cache actually is used extensively is a question unto itself, though. It really depends on the kind of work you do. In any case, any M.2 SSD should have more than sufficient transfer bandwith to deal with whatever scenario may come up and a standard 512 GB setup should be good enough for most everyday work. Throwing too much money out of the window is not necessary.

Mylenium

[Mz Creative]

I get your point. But my issue deals a lot with Element 3d. the caching helps tremendously when working through the project. I realize it can be overkill but I sure use it a lot.

Not to mention, if you use a larger cache drive, when i close the project down the frames rendered stay in the cache unless you go over the limit then they start deleting frames. but not having to re-render frames was always helpful. But being able to close a project and come back to it later and still have all those frames rendered into cache saves me a lot of time because I frequently work on multiple projects during the day