Z690 MB+3x 1TB M.2 drives. 4speed Projects Cache Go Where?

Hello All!
I had to upgrade my MB (old died) Therefore, I started a fresh installation of everything. Z690+12700k. MB has 4x GEN4 M.2 slots that I filled with 3x GEN4 1TB drives. The 3 drives are C (os) and 2 blank (1TB) M.2 drives. All 3 drives have a CrystalDiskMark: READ ~7,000MB/s and WRITE of ~5,300MB/s.

QUESTIONS: How should I configure the drives for DR? Obviously the program itself goes on C.
1) Projects on D and
2) Cache on E?
3) Renders also go to E or D? What about backups? Etc Etc...

Side note... only active project(s) will be on the Project drive.

Another Question... Does DR support BOTH the iGPU (12700k) and my dGPU for various tasks?

Go into preferences and click decode. Make sure both Intel QuickSync and I assume Nvidia are selected. You'll need to make sure your MB didn't turn off the IGPU when you inserted the GPU. I think that's the only place you can get both working. But it gives you much better HEVC support.

1TB drives aren't that big. I'd lean towards writing the renders to E with your setup. Not sure it'll make a huge difference.

You won't go 'wrong' if you follow the traditional wisdom for splitting operations across multiple drives Marc, but that said, I wouldn't obsess too much about it. That traditional wisdom is largely based on older tech limitations. Todays insanely fast solid state storage is a whole other world.

For what its worth tho, my PC system is: OS, Apps and Database on C, Scratch on D and Project Media on E.... all M.2 NVMe, gen 4 blah blah etc. Render/Exports go to the scratch drive; Gallery, Backups etc are pointing at a HDD RAID. All seems to work well enough for me and the data is protected against any single point of failure.

Go into preferences and click decode. Make sure both Intel QuickSync and I assume Nvidia are selected. You'll need to make sure your MB didn't turn off the IGPU when you inserted the GPU. I think that's the only place you can get both working. But it gives you much better HEVC support.

1TB drives aren't that big. I'd lean towards writing the renders to E with your setup. Not sure it'll make a huge difference.

Hi Nick... Thanks! Yep... iGPU was off and needed activated in bios.

You won't go 'wrong' if you follow the traditional wisdom for splitting operations across multiple drives Marc, but that said, I wouldn't obsess too much about it. That traditional wisdom is largely based on older tech limitations. Todays insanely fast solid state storage is a whole other world.

For what its worth tho, my PC system is: OS, Apps and Database on C, Scratch on D and Project Media on E.... all M.2 NVMe, gen 4 blah blah etc. Render/Exports go to the scratch drive; Gallery, Backups etc are pointing at a HDD RAID. All seems to work well enough for me and the data is protected against any single point of failure.

Hi Andy, Yep... my limits are now the older GPU (maybe things will be better later in the yr) My M2 drives only will contain active projects then they are backed up (then removed) to multiple external drives.