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matheusrvdc
Participant
September 24, 2023
Question

SSD writing and reading speed for cache

  • September 24, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 4954 views

I'm currently upgrading my PC, and while I'm aware that moving from 64 to 128GB RAM will improve its AE performance significantly, I'm wondering about SSDs and the overall media cache performance. My question is: how fast does the SSD dedicted to cache need to be?

 

A gen 4 NVMe with speeds up to 7GB/s will provide me a very noticeable fludiness over a gen 3 NVMe with 3GB/s? Or the writing/reading speed in such cases is not so determinant that even a normal sata with 500MB/s would be enough and not bottleneck the caching/playback?

 

From what I've been reading here and there, very high speeds would be sort of overkill, as After Effects usually don't need to write/read data in order of GB every second, but I wanted to confirm it to make sure I don't spend money unecessarily on a super fast SSD that wouldn't really provide me any real benefit for daily AE work.

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2 replies

Roland Kahlenberg
Roland Kahlenberg
Legend
September 28, 2023

Frames rendered in RAM gets written to the Cache Folder/Drive when AE needs to push out these rendered frames to make spacec for new data/rendered frames. 

So, the cache drive is used for AE to write rendered frames from RAM.

The cache drive is also used by AE when you initiate a Preview and AE recognizes that the frames it requires for this preview reside in the cache drive. 

So, AE's cache drive is used by AE to read rendered frames. 

And, the frames AE renders are a composite of what's on the timeline. So, there are no layers but just a single layer representating the visual information of the timeline.

A 500MBps SSD is sufficient to initiate a Preview for a HD1080 comp without any lag; meaning AE should be able to playback the Preview immediately or after a few short seconds. 

Rendered frames stored in cache are denoted by a thin Blue Line at the top of the timeline. When you initiate a Preview with frames stored in the cache drive and these frames are invoked, you should see the Blue Line turn to Green as these frames are loaded into RAM for playback by AE. 

With a slow drive, you will notice a lag as AE reads from the slow cache drive and then drops them into RAM for actual playback. If you have a fast drive for cache, AE can read quicker and then write faster, to RAM. 

HTH
 

Very Advanced After Effects Training | Adaptive & Responsive Toolkits | Intelligent Design Assets (IDAs) | MoGraph Design System DEV
UnderTheStairs
UnderTheStairs
Known Participant
October 7, 2023

Hi Roland,

 

So essentially then, if I have adequate rAM installed and I'm working mostly in HD, using an SSD that's able to read/write at anything more than 1000MBps is overkill for a cache drive and a media/project drive with AE?

 

You're saying a SATA SSD will be fine - no need to install an NVME SSD?

 

Thanks.

UnderTheStairs
UnderTheStairs
Known Participant
October 11, 2023

It's not too late to exchange the M2 Mac Studio for something with larger Flash storage by any chance?  Yes, it's pricy, but it's up there in the 5,000 to 6,000 MB per second range.  At those speeds, it's actually the deal of the century.  Apple's internal Flash storage makes for exceptional cache performance in all things Adobe.

Personally, I've always gone with as large of Flash storage as Apple's offering since they switched to Flash storage as standard in the laptops (2013, I think), keeping it to 4TB since they've provided 8TB options.

OWC makes some great storage products.  Rather than the Envoy, I'd go with something that offers better cooling under extended workloads like the ThunderBlade, Express 4M2, Mercury Pro U.2 Dual, or Gemini.



 


...and also yes, the internal SSD's in the mac studios are crazy fast but I don't want to put the cache folder on there as I want to leave that purely for OS and apps and avoid heavy write counts/prolong drive life.

ShiveringCactus
Community Expert
ShiveringCactusCommunity Expert
Community Expert
September 25, 2023

Once you start getting into the weeds on performance, I struggle, but often refer to this article on School of Motion:

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/after-effects-computer

They spec out a high-end PC having spoken with Adobe's engineers and if nothing else, it helps confirm what elements can make a performance difference.

    M
    matheusrvdcAuthor
    Participant
    September 25, 2023

    Yeah, it's not so easy to find material covering these aspects, and it's quite confusing to me cause I can't seem to find a consensus.

     

    I had come across that (pretty good) article from School of Motion few days ago, and yeah, in that case they recommend gen 4 SSDs. But at the same time, there's a test ran by Puget Systems in which they stated that there isn't much difference between Sata, NVMe 3.0 and NVMe 4.0 for AE:

    https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/adobe-after-effects-cc-2017-disk-cache-performance-analysis-874/

     

    So, some people say you should get the fastest SSD possible, others say you don't need to overspend in high end SSDs cause it'd be overkill and you can get pretty much the same speed with cheaper hardware. It's not so clear which direction we're supposed to go to improve cache peformance.

    ShiveringCactus
    Community Expert
    ShiveringCactusCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    September 28, 2023

    I'm not convinced an expensive cache drive makes all that much difference, but the more you use it the faster it will wear out.  I learned that after setting up a new PC last year.  For future builds, I'm going to look at ease of swapping SSDs as a feature.

    AE for me has always been about RAM, the more I have the better the "performance" - in quotes, because for me it's about how much I can preview and how many layers I can have.

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