Hard Disk Setup for Video Editing

Question

Dear Forum.
My name is Tom Woods and I was hoping that you may be able to advise me or point me in the right direction, in regards to the question below....
  : ) Im not sure if you are in this area or not, my apologies to you if this is the case.. Here goes..
I'm thinking of getting Adobe Production Premium installed where ill be using Photoshop, After Effects, and Premier Pro, and need some advice on my current Disk Setup to maximize performance to work with editing HD 1080i video.
My question is;
"Which of my internal 'Disks', do I assign the following processes to, these processes are;
Photoshop: SCRATCH DISK
After Effects: DISK CACHE
Premier Pro: SCRATCH DISK Captured Video  / SCRATCH DISK Captured Audio  / SCRATCH DISK Video Previews  / SCRATCH DISK  Audio Previews   
Premier Pro: MEDIA CACHE FILES / DATABASE
And finally the recorded Video 'parts' ready for editing, and the 'previews', and then the 'saved project file'.
My current Disk setup is:
C: SSD - 90GB (quite full)
D: SSD - still considering size to purchase
E: SSD - still considering size to purchase
F: HDD - 500 GB (currently used for all Video Parts and all work)
*Also, for drives D & E, what 'SIZE' in GB would they need to be for assigning the Scratch, Cache and other files mentioned above? (when i purchase them)*
If you can help me out with this it would be totally amazing, im really stuck and finding internet advice very unclear..
I appreciate you will be busy but I thought I would try here first for some help! Thank you so much for reading this so far...
My Best regards to you
Timmy

Answer 1

Tom,
Let's start with the terminology. Once you understand that, things will become a lot easier.
MEDIA: Name for all the raw material you shot, whether video or pictures or audio recordings. It does not matter whether this was captured from tape based video cameras, or imported from card or disk based cameras.
MEDIA CACHE: When Media are imported into a project, PR automatically creates three kind of files that are stored in the location you set up in the Preferences. They are .IMS files or indexed files, .CFA or conformed audio files and last .PEK files, that display the audio waveform in the timeline.
MEDIA CACHE DATABASE: Also automatically created by PR and contains pointers to the files in the Media Cache.
Note that occasionally the Media Cache and Media Cache Database can become corrupted and in that case it is a good idea to Clean the Media Cache from Preferences. When opening a project indexing, conforming and generation of PEK files is automatically done. Just be a bit patient for that process to finish.
PREVIEWS: Also called RENDER files. When you render a timeline to turn the red bar into a green bar for preview purposes, PR stores .XMP files in the PRV directory location you have set in the Project Settings.
Media files are typically very large and require a good sustained sequential read speed. Once ingested (imported or captured) they remain unchanged, because PR is a non-destructive editor. On the one hand this makes a SSD an ideal type of disk, because it is only reading the media files and not writing, but the size may be the limiting factor.
Media cache files are typically small and many, so here sustained R/W transfer rates are important, making it less than ideal to put them on a SSD, because the major drawback of SSD's is their limited and finite number of writes.
Now Tom, to your specific situation:
C: SSD for OS & programs.
D: HDD for media and projects (because of the size of the media and frequent changes in projects).
E: SSD for static page-file and exports.
F: SSD for media cache and previews, although a HDD may give you better life expectancy but also slower performance.
Maybe this article can be helpful as well, because it shows the impact of codecs on your system: Adobe Forums: What PC to build? An update...
You may have to get additional HDD's for raid configuations, if you edit 4K material or 422 material, because it is all about transfer rates.
To give you a rough indications of what you can expect from your drives, I suggest you get HD Tune Pro to test for yourself, but here are some indicative figures:
SSD: R around 450 MB/s, W around 300 MB/s, depending on the brand/model in steady state with SATA 6G. SATA 3G is far slower. Sandforce controllers may top out around 250 MB/s W.
HDD: R around 150 MB/s, W around 140 MB/s