Hey team!
I’m having trouble keeping all these storage options in my head. I imagine someone here has more experience than I do.
Background: I built a server a few months back, but now I’m piecing together a desktop workstation build for mostly Adobe stuff – Premiere, Audition, Lightroom, and Photoshop.
Here’s what I’ve selected so far:
- Ryzen 9 3950X
- MSi MEG X570 Unify motherboard
- 64 GB G.Skill Trident Z Neo 3600 MHz C16 RAM
- EVGA 2080 Super XC Gaming
- 10 gigabit ethernet to my server’s HDDs for long term storage
The X570 Unify motherboard has one PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 connected directly to the CPU, and two others in via the X570 chipset. There are numerous SATA ports as well.
My understanding is that ideal performance in Premiere would have three drives
- OS and software
- Media files
- Scratch disks and media cache
I’ll need at least a 2TB drive for temporary video files. Would you see a benefit from making the other drives larger?
For Lightroom, I found an article that seems to suggest I should put photographs on my HDDs on my server, with fastest drives used for catalog and previews.
Then for Windows, I’ve never really configured it any way other than simply one drive. Is the solution just go into each Documents, Downloads, Programs, etc. folder and choosing to store it on a different drive? Is there a more elegant solution?
My biggest point of confusion comes mostly from the motherboard restrictions: if I only have one Gen 4 NVMe slot not being run through the chipset, I would consider that my fastest drive. Do I want my OS and software on that? Or should I reserve that for caching, Lightroom catalog, and Premiere scratch disk? Or should I use that for temporary Premiere media storage? Maybe they could all be gen 4 NVMe since the drives through the chipset probably wouldn’t be throttling the max x4 speeds?
I’m a bit of a rookie here, but feel free to ask for more clarification if I’m not making any sense 