The BEST Premiere Pro Scratch Disk and Media Cache Setup

Video Editing PC - Hard drive Optimisation

I'm just going to go through the best way I've found to optimise your hard-drives for Premiere Pro. This kind of setup will also work for DaVinci Resolve.

I'm using a Windows workstation and so I'm able to have multiple internal hard drives. 

Ideally, you want to have the fastest drives possible for your operating systems, media cache and scratch disk. 

My current setup looks like this:

I have my OS and all of my editing applications on a 256 GB Samsung NVMe M.2 drive. 

This is the fastest drive I have installed. I don't keep anything else on here.

Next up I have a 256 GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD. This is where I assign my Premiere Pro media cache and scratch disk. I could have a larger SSD here if needed but as I delete cache files regularly, it never even comes close to filling up. Having your media cache and scratch disk set to their own dedicated drive really helps to speed up your workflow. 

I have a 1tb Samsung 860 EVO SSD for the current project files and source media I'm working on. Depending on the project, 1 TB is usually enough for several current projects for me. If the project is larger, I can use external SSD's here or a fast USB C drive.

finally installed, I have just a standard 1 TB Seagate HDD, this is just where I can dump extras like my downloads and random documents. I honestly don't use it for much at all, but it's nice to have in case I have to download a massive project file and haven't worked out where to put it yet. 

Once I've finished working on a project I take it off my internal SSD and add it to a standard HDD that can be backed up.