Premiere Pro + External Hard Drive Best Practices

[mpw-pdx]

For best performance when editing in premiere, is it recommended to keep raw files and project files on seperate drives?  Does this make workflow and response time quicker? What are the most efficient and safest options? Thanks

[BEINGNITING-S7JVCG]

Thread Moved to Premeire Pro Section.

[the_wine_snob]

What are the connection types and HDD speeds for those externals?

Does your MoBo, or card have multiple ports, and are they using separate controller chips?

Will you only be using the externals on one computer?

What OS are you running?

In general terms, the more that you can spread your I/O load, the better things will be.

Good luck,

Hunt

[joe_bloe_premiere]

For best performance when editing in premiere...

Optimizing for performance:

Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects

[Jim_Simon]

Here's what I recommend as the starting point for a good editing experience.

C: System

D: Projects

E: Scratch

F: Media

G: Exports

Here's what I recommend as a bare minimum:

C: System

D: Projects/Scratch

E: Media/Exports

[Stephen_Spider]

I see this repeated over and over. I have not found it to be true. I have found over and over again that a single dedicated 7200 internal drive for media will work just fine. This is editing RT employing mainly DV, HDV, Cannon XF and Sony XdCam up to 50 Mbps. This includes multicamera projects up to four cameras.

Since 2002 I have set up at least 10 separate Premiere based NLE PCs and have witnessed hundreds of projects across these many systems edited with Premiere 6.0, 6.5, Pro 1.5 Pro 2.0, CS4, CS5x, and CS6.  The only time when hard discs became an issue was a misadventure using USB external drives.

I experimented, early in DV editing days, with advising editors to save their graphics, music, and project files on a separate internal media drive. However I could never get a consistent compliance with that, so for file management sake, I began having users keep all scratch disc dialogues checked to "same as project". That way they just needed to be certain to create their project folder on a Media drive, and save their project into that folder.

Things have been smooth with that. I think that over the years I've had enough testing to say with confidence that anyone will be fine with it for general use with codecs up to 50Mbps per stream.

The only place I've found some benefit is in targeting a separate internal drive for exports. This can speed up exports a bit, but I haven't found wild differences.

So a typical system I might set up or use would map like this:

     C: System (usually a raid0)

     D: internal 7200 rpm Media 1 (Active Premiere Projects)

     G: USB\Firewire External Drives  Storage (Inactive premiere projects and offline file storage)

      Additional video edit space set up as:

     E: internal 7200 rpm Media 2 (Active Premiere Projects)

Again, lots of experience with this set up and no drive performance issues.

[Jim_Simon]

I have found over and over again that a single dedicated 7200 internal drive for media will work just fine.

I don't disagree.  Most compressed camera formats will run just fine from a single 7200 internal drive.  That's why you see that in the basic recommendation.  Once you get into RAW, Uncompressed, DPX or similar files, that's when creating a RAID for speed becomes more necessary.

[Trickylee]

Since hard drives are cheaper now one has to be more flexible. I have 4drives of 8pieces Nicknamed WinhomeC; Storage D; Videostore E; and Finishjobs F

Winhome C - 2x 120gb SSD raid for System and DVD temp files; Storage D/ 2x 750gb raid for presets, templates, digital juice, graghics, clients info with project files,

Videostore E/- 2x3gb for Captures, Previews and cache. Finishjobs  F/ 2x1tb for finished jobs, All are 8hard drives in raids and I get the speeds that I need being

handled equally by the drives

[pets]

as we are in 2019 now, may i ask, if working with a external USB 3.0 HD drive (not ssd) is too slow for premiere pro cc on a mac pro 2013 (64GB RAM, 500GB SSD) with 4k footage? (highsierra, all project files and footage are on this external drive, and it as 500GB, so too huge for copying to the internal SSD)