scratch disk question

P
Posted By
Phosphor
Sep 25, 2003
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164
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4
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Closed
I know that it’s better to assign a separate disk or partition as your primary scratch disk if you have that option, but supposedly the scratch should also be your fastest drive. One of my neighbors was asking me about using a usb (not usb 2) external drive, which is fairly large, but I presume also fairly slow because of the connection.

What’s best to do in this situation? Keep the C drive as the main scratch or try the slower external?
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P
Phosphor
Sep 25, 2003
Barbara,

I would move data and programs to the external drive, making as much room as possible on C: and keep it as the primary scratch disk.

Juergen
EM
Elena Murphy
Sep 25, 2003
Because the use of a hard drive or partition as a scratch disk causes major fragmentation fairly quickly, it’s always best to use a drive with no other data on it.

That said, if using an external is so slow it’s driving you insane, you could always make sure you have a defragmenter application handy and run it once a week or so. Because if your system software is getting fragmented, you’ll see slow down in computer operation due to that. If you do go with that option, I would also use Juergen’s suggestion of taking off as many files as possible so fewer files are impacted by the fragmentation.
PD
Peter Duniho
Sep 25, 2003
"Barbara Brundage" wrote in message
I know that it’s better to assign a separate disk or partition as your primary scratch disk if you have that option, but supposedly the scratch should also be your fastest drive. One of my neighbors was asking me about using a usb (not usb 2) external drive, which is fairly large, but I presume also fairly slow because of the connection.

Yes, a USB v1 connection will be far worse than mixing scratch with your other data and programs. Frankly, IMHO that external drive is useful only for backing stuff up. I would never run any programs or data directly from it, because of the slow connection.

If you are really concerned about disk performance, partition the drive so you can ensure that the scratch area remains separate. But if you’re really that concerned, better solutions would be to either a) buy a new internal hard drive for the purpose of the scratch drive, or b) purchase enough additional RAM that you don’t wind up accessing the scratch drive.

RAM and drives are both cheap these days, and are a much easier and fruitful way to address this issue. Even if you partition your existing drive to keep the scratch data separate, you will still run into disk bandwidth issues any time you are accessing different partitions on the same drive at the same time. The only way to solve that is to either not access the disk (more RAM) or access a completely different hardware device (new disk).

Pete
P
Phosphor
Sep 25, 2003
Thanks, everyone. Pete, that’s about what I figured.

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