Scratch disks

JS
Posted By
Julie_S.
Jun 2, 2004
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263
Replies
1
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Closed
I’ve read TFM. Could someone give me a basic lesson on what the scratch disk is and how I should manage it. I’m working in Photoshop 7 and haven’t been having any problems but would like to understand what a scratch disk is. I’ve looked in the manual and found nothing. My searches on-line reveal problems and issues from people who already understand what the scratch disk is and the threads tend to be way over my head.

Thanks
Jules
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Graham_Phillips
Jun 2, 2004
The scratch disk is Photoshop’s working space. Photoshop can, and often does, use lots and lots of memory to work its magic.

Computers have two types of memory: RAM, which is composed of microchips and is very fast but expensive; and hard disk, which is made of magnetic matter and is slow but very cheap, very high capacity, and doesn’t forget its contents when the power is turned off.

Because Photoshop is designed to process very large images, images which may not fit entirely within the available RAM, it uses the scratch disk as main memory and RAM as a buffer for keeping the speed up. By default, Photoshop nominates the startup disk (the hard disk) as the scratch disk.

If you have additonal disks attached to your Mac, you can nominate one or more of them for Photoshop’s scratch disk. You might do this if the additional disk is quicker than your startup disk, or has greater free space.

In essence, the scratch disk is equivalent to a set of temporary files, but it it turns out that the scratch disk scheme is very much faster.

My apologies to the Photoshop team for the gross simplification.

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