Premiere Pro constantly having laggy playback

[A_Cortes]

Hi, everyone!

I've had this issue for a long time, I'm posting here in the hope of finding feedback from the community. I have a computer with decent characteristics and still Premiere Pro constantly has laggy playback even with only a 1080x1920 video. Now, I know this is not about having good hardware, but software, drivers, and codecs need to be considered. In this example, I'm trying to make some cuts on a video with the following properties: 

Image Size: 1920 x 1080
Frame Rate: 50.00
Source Audio Format: 48000 Hz - Compressed - Stereo
Project Audio Format: 48000 Hz - 32-bit floating point - Stereo
Total Duration: 00:17:23:08
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.0
Alpha: None
Color Space: Rec. 709
Color Space Override: Off
Input LUT: None
Video Codec Type: MP4/MOV H.264 4:2:0 

I'm just doing some cuts but still, you can see how laggy the playback is. I have GPU acceleration activated, set the memory to 16 GB for other applications, and turned off high-quality playback on the program monitor. You can see how it performs here:  

Here are my system specs. Everything is up to date. For Premiere Pro, I'm normally a version or two behind to avoid unexpected bugs. Right now I have version 23.3.0

Any tips for fixing this performance issue? Thank you for reading. 

[Peru Bob]

Only one 250 GB SSD?

What are the hard drives (how many, what kind, what is on each, what capacity, and how full)?

[A_Cortes]

Thanks for replying, Bob. 

For storage I have:

x1 Corsair MP600 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME - for the OS and Adobe Software. It has some games. 

x1  Samsung 860 Evo 250 GB M.2-2280 - for cache only

x1 Wester digital wd6003fzbx-00k5wb0 6TB for video and photo work. This is where I have all the footage. 

x1 wdc wd2003fzex-00srla0 2tb for video and photo work too. 

These are their current capacities:

[Peru Bob]

The C and E drives are getting full.

Replace the WD HDDs with fast SSDs.

[A_Cortes]

Will try that on my next hardware upgrade , thanks

[M_Telling]

I have had similair problems during the years. 

Try the following:

1. Test your system load: hist CTRL+ALT+DELETE and watch the CPU, Harddrive, RAM. GPU load during playback. Does it peak out in any of these? 

2. Test your harddrive speed - if it can´t read or write at at least 150-200 MB/S you may have a problem. Use SSD disks for the data and cache if possible. 

Things to try:

1. Delete your media cache files (Edit>Preferences>Media Cache) - This can also be done 

2. Try adjusting the playback resolution to 1/4 or 1/2

3. During start up pres ALT key - select Reset app preferences, Clear media Cache files, Reset plugin loading Cache and hit continue. This solved my issues once. 

4. Check if all drivers are up to date.

[A_Cortes]

Thank you, I've been monitoring my system load. Premiere gets laggy when I have several graphics on my timeline. I thought throwing it 128Gb of RAM would solve the problem, lol. I will continue to do this before I make any decision on changing hardware. 

Cheers! thanks for your time.