Scratch Disk For PhotoShop

moonwitch

Dec 17 2005, 08:53 PM

Lately I've been wondering about the scratch disk option in Photoshop, while the topic is more of less software related; I've always been told that a scratch disk is best made a SCSI hard drive. Would it be beneficial for my system? Or is it just a pricy option?

Here are my current comp specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Maxtor 120GB @ 7200RPM
1024MB RAM DDR400
MSI K8N Platinum motherboard
ATi Radeon 9250 with 128MB

Can someone shed some light onto this issue? I have been thinking about upgrading my graphics card, or RAM or both. LOL (2GB RAM should be nice

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yordan

Dec 17 2005, 09:59 PM

If you have only one or two disks, SCSI or IDE are not very different, so no real problem having the scratch disk on the same drive you already have. Nevertheless, having a second drive could help, but probably not more than 10% improvement.
By the way, if you are using M$oft Windows, no need to have more than 1gig Memory, you wil probably not take fully benefit of more than the first 200 Megs RAM. Of course, if you switch to Linux, things could be different, but then you would not be able to use Photoshop...
Regards
Yordan

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saint-michael

Dec 18 2005, 04:59 PM

well this is a quote from the support page on scratch disks

QUOTE

A scratch disk in Photoshop is similar to virtual memory in Mac OS. For the best performance, you should set the primary scratch disk to a defragmented hard drive that is not running the OS, and that has plenty of unused space and fast read/write speeds (rather than a network drive or removable media such as a Zip drive). Photoshop requires at least 750 MB of free hard-disk space, but more is recommended. The OS volume should contain at least 20 GB of free space to ensure the virtual memory system has plenty of available hard disk space. If you have more than one hard drive, it is suggested that you specify additional scratch disks. Note that RAID 0 partitions provide the best performance as Photoshop scratch disks. Photoshop CS2 supports up to 64 exabytes (EB) of scratch disk space on a total of four volumes. (An EB is equal to 1 billion gigabytes.)

and from the specs you are giving you have plenty of space to allocate the space required to run adobe with out any problems on your computer, but I would suggest if you can afford it get a second hard drive and do it with that one so with a just in case something goes wrong you don't have to worry about losing anything.

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