Video render devoured my hard drive + extremely slow

24 minutes and a single shot with music visualization - no offense but who is going to watch that?

Second, AE is for creating visual effects shots, not for creating movies.

Third, there is probably nothing wrong, it's probably your workflow, frame size, frame rate and added effects that are taking the time. There is almost never a good reason to render something like a music visualization at 60 fps. 24 is plenty. You know all those cartoons you liked to watch when you were a kid? They were almost all 12 images per second, each image recorded twice, then 3:2 Pulldown added and sent to television at 29.97 fps, and they looked fine and entertained. Just changing the frame rate to 30 is going to cut your render time in half and you won't be able to find one person in a thousand that is going to notice the difference when they watch your masterpiece on YouTube. The same thing goes for two pass rendering. That is almost always about a 40 to 50% increase in render time. Unless your film started out as 10 bit or better lossless video and the project is 16-bit or better, and there is a tremendous amount of detail in the image, nobody is going to be able to tell the difference between single pass h.264 and two pass rendering, even if they pixel peep and play with blend modes to compare frames.

With a lot of effects, the AME is going to be slower. A 24-minute long image sequence from the Render Cue is going to render faster than any compressed format using the AME. When you finish rendering an image sequence you drop that image sequence into Premiere Pro, add the sound, and render from there.

I never send anything that is going to take a significant amount of time to render directly to video. What if something happens at frame 200 and the comp is 230 frames long and you have rendered a compressed video? Answer: You start over. If you render an image sequence you go to the comp at frame 200, set the work area start there, try and figure out what went wrong, then render the last 30 frames. When you have finished your masterpiece and rendered the final file for delivery (h.254 - mp4 is the best choice right now for that), you can simply delete the image sequence, or if you have space and a need to archive like Pixar or Digital Domain, or ILM, then save it. They do, and they almost never finish any effects work as a video, it's almost always an image sequence. They will deliver a 1080 P proxy to the editors to cut the film, but the image sequences are used to render the production master and if your render is going to take longer than overnight you should always go out and spend $50 on a hard drive and render an image sequence. It will save you a ton of time in the long run.

If your normal 3-minute video took an hour to render, and you used the same workflow and did not add anything at all but time a 24-minute video would take about 8 hours. If you added particles to the video and they kept generating for the entire 24 minutes it is very easy to predict that the last third of the render would take at least three times as long to render as the first third because the particles and therefore the calculations required to render them can easily be cumulative. There are lots of other things that enthusiasts often add to music visualizations that cause cumulative rendering slowdowns. Throw in the hight frame rate and the multi-pass rendering and it's pretty easy to see where the 60-hour prediction comes from.

I hope some of these suggestions help. I never would think of spending my time on a single shot that was 24 minutes long. Andy Warhol tried that and it wasn't successful even though intellectuals continue to debate the art in his cinematic time capsules. 90% of my AE comps are under 7 seconds, most of my films are more than 30 minutes, many of them are much longer, but they are all edited so that they tell an effective story.