External ssd, after effect causing countless issue with my Mac

[Carlota29814645lsq3]

Hello,

I am experiencing persistent issues with my After Effects including really bad lagging, preview problems, and ridiculous rendering times.

i already have tried all this issue solution that i can found on youtube, such as purging caches and implementing recommended fixes and all that, I have not been able to resolve the issues.

I am using an external SanDisk SSD, with all my caches and After Effects files saved on it. However, I am encountering difficulties even saving files to the SSD, as I am receiving the error message: "After Effects error: file not found."

My computer specs are m3 Pro processor, 18GB RAM, 11-core CPU, and 14 GPU.

Does anyone have any suggestions or solutions to address these issues?

[Peru Bob]

Several suggestions here worked for some users:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/error-file-not-found-3-0/td-p/10120438

This is one:

urajbar wrote:

I had this problem also. I could not save to my external SSD drive. Tried with deleting preferences but it didnt work. Also restarting my MacBook didnt work either. Last thing that did work is changing/renaming folder I was trying to save to. Dont know if this will help anyone. It worked for me. 

I work on latest AE version, MacBook Pro M1Pro. 

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[RjL190365]

What is your exact SanDisk external SSD?

If your unit is the plain (non-Extreme) model, it is a horrible unit that's no faster (in large-file sustained writes) than the average USB 3.0 pen drive. In fact, that SSD is slower than even a mechanically spinning HDD in sustained large-file writes!

[Warren Heaton]

Sorry to hear that you are having trouble.

Which version of macOS are your running?  Which version of After Effects?

It's possible that what you're animating is complex enough that for faster perfomance in After Effects that you'll want to work with the Composition Resolution to Half or Quarter and maybe skip frames when for Previews.  Then spot check thing at Full as you work.  If you check the Render Time pane in the Timeline panel, do any layers stand out as taking much longer than the others?

The internal Flash storage used by Apple in all of the Apple Silicon based Macs is extremely fast.  I'd use that for the Media Cache location while keeping your files on the external SSD (which is also fast, but not as fast).   To test the read and write speeds of your drives, you can download Blackmagic Disk Speed Test (free from the Mac App Store) and run it on each drives.  The Macintosh HD will probably come back at 3,000 or higher with the external SSD at 600 to 800.

As far as the error message "After Effects error: file not found." goes, does After Effects have the permissions needed to run?  That is, if macOS presented a promt that After Effects needs permission did you always choose "Allow".   Also, how are you organizing each project?  Is everything for each project in the same folder?  So, let's say you're doing a projects on butterflies.  Is the After Effects project file and all source footage files in the "Butterflies" folder?