Will SSD cache acceleration on a NAS have any affect on AE performance?

[dastolidigital]

I am looking into making upgrades to the performance of my NAS with the hopes that it will directly affect AE frame load times. Before I do that I need to figure out if the After Effects caching system negates the need or this.

Currently I have an internal NVMe M.2 drive (Samsung 950 PRO 256GB) as my After Effects cache.

All of my footage is stored on a NAS (QNAP TVS-671 i3 4G) with a RAID5 filled entirely with 7200 RPM drives, connected to my computer with a 10Gbe card.

My computer has 64 GB of RAM.

I've been reading about SSD cache acceleration being able to increase the performance of my NAS. Basically if I swap out one of my NAS drive bays with an SSD it will store all the recently and currently used files on the SSD cache and be faster to access than on the RAID5 with 7200rpm drives. Will this have any affect on the speed with which After Effects accesses and works with my footage, or does this not matter at all because all of the footage exists either on the RAM inside the computer or on the AE cache M.2 drive while I'm actually working in AE?

The biggest performance issues I've been having are with linear EXR sequnces at 32bpc. It takes way too long to do anything with them, including just playing with no effects.

[Mylenium]

Long and short: AE's EXR handling is simply garbage. You are wasting your time and mucking around with hardware configuration stuff won't change anything. Very likely you're already seeing the fastest possible file I/O, it's more that AE is simply creaking and cracking and won't process the buffer data fast enough. That would also apply to pretty much anything else. whatever issues you have have nothing to do with the physical hardware, just AE being what it is, including its terrible caching system.

Mylenium