There have been many questions about how to set up your disks.
Where do I put my media cache files, where the page file, and what about my preview files?
All these allocations can be set in PR, so I made this overview to help you find some settings that may be beneficial. It is not a law to do it like this, it is a generic approach that would suit many users, but depending on source material, workflow and backup possibilities, it is not unthinkable you need to deviate from this approach in your individual case.
The reasoning behind this overview is that you want to distibute disk access across as many disks as possible and get the best performance.
Look for yourself:
I hope this helps to remove doubts you may have had about your setup or to find a setup that improves performance.
425
Replies
My goodness, all this hard drive planning is mind-boggling, isn't it?? Know this: Whatever hard drive layout you come up with, you'll change it in a year, lol! My rig is a lot different than when I built it 18 months ago. But having the patience to plan it out does save a lot of grief.
Anyway, some replies:
- PerfectPair: Don't sweat it, I lost track too, and I'm part of the conversation!
- Bret: I hadn't even looked at Adobe's recommendations for scratch disks, so it's good you brought that up. I tell ya, I wouldn't make my asset drive hold my scratch disk regardless and I wouldn't use my OS drive, so the other option is a third or even fourth drive, and those are likely to be your "slowest" drives, but certainly they shouldn't be slow drives. 7200rpm with 32mb cache should be the bottom benchmark. No, wait, a 4200rpm usb external! Yeah, that's it!
- Bill: your assets (a.k.a. footage and audio files) should be on your RAID drive for fastest speed when editing. You'll get them on that RAID drive simply by copying them there off your camera. I'm old school, I don't use these import utilities that all these apps come with (I have wanted to shoot the Adobe Photo Downloader with a Remington 12-Gauge closed-choke over-and-under shotgun, lol!). But that does bring up a thought based on you saying you need to move between two computers. Really? Ouch, that takes some reconfiguring. Remember, when you create the Pr project, you have all these project files that hold the meta-data for the project which includes pointers to the location of your footage. The footage doesn't get copied into Premiere and embedded, so if you gather up the project files and put them on another computer you won't have your footage (Premiere will let you know that, don't you worry), you'll just have the project files with your settings and edits and all that. You would also have to copy the footage and move it to the other computer, and that can get long and ugly with gigabytes of video clips. It seems like you would literally need a portable hard drive for your assets that is a RAID5 setup and sports an eSata connection so it's as fast (or nearly) as an internal RAID5. LaCie makes an expensive "4Big" drive drive ( http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-301359U-Quadra-FireWire-Firewire/dp/B001GFB6I8/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&... ) that can do just that, and you could move it back and forth to both computers, plug it in, and Premiere will retrieve the footage off of it for the project. But it has to be RAID5 and it has to be eSata. USB and FireWire 400/800 aren't even CLOSE to being fast enough, which probably contradicts what Apple has said in the past, but a lot has changed in 18 months. The 4Big does all types of connections, so you can access data off of it from any PC if you need to by using the USB or FireWire ports, but don't use those for editing. You really need to edit across two machines, huh? Might be easier to unplug the Mac and carry it to the second location, lol! OK, this new scenario does throw a hitch in the plan, but if you have to haul footage back and forth between two computers, you might have to go with a fast eSata external RAID drive. Oy! Crazy, isn't it?
AdChoices