Hi Ryan,

I have no hardware suggestions here.

I assume I do not tell you anything new here:

Measure the speed you get from your internal SSD and what you get from an external SSD. The speed printed on a box is often not a practical value; you need to do that in your setup; anything else is unreliable. Besides that, the connection matters. It is not simple to tell how good each interface is. Thunderbolt 4 should give you plenty, but 8K tells very little. Is it raw, compressed, etc? When I capture 8K with my camera, that makes a huge difference. If you use Dropbox, it sounds like you have compressed data, but that is all guessing.
I would test a few drives and combinations. My setup here is purely SSD; some I bought promised speed and typically provide 70% of that. Some are more in the 90%. Again, many factors and how your system is set up are involved.

Perhaps a card that can hold memory is preferable. I saw solutions that allow for 26GB/s up to 64GB (OWC), which should allow for a few 8K streams. 😉

Cinema 4D uses any speed if data needs to be loaded. But how much it is on the bottom line, again it depends.

A free speed measure is available from Black Magic Design.

My best wishes for your project

Hi Ryan,

If it was internally cached, the file size must be much larger just to give you an indicator.
If cached, the results will be the same, AFAIK; otherwise, we would have many posts here from render farm results and jumping frames.

Caching cloth, to my understanding, is point-based; there is no derivation.
If you would like to test this, write out an Alembic file and load it into the Cached file as a "reference." It is highly unlikely that both change in the same way.

Since it is easily imaginable that I do not have the two setups that cause your trouble, please get a second opinion on that, meaning get in touch with Maxon's tech support at
https://www.maxon.net/en/support-center

(It might take longer this week as we have a company-wide meeting.)

All the best