Improving performance in PS 7 ?

M
Posted By
Marco
Aug 4, 2005
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245
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Improving performance in PS 7 ?

I got this message when I installed PS 7……..
You currently have Adobe Photoshop’s primary Scratch and Windows’ primary paging file on the same volume, which can result in reduced performance. It is recommended that you set Adobe Photoshop’s primary Scratch volume to be on a different volume, preferably on a different drive.
Does anyone know how to do this but I only have one drive which is Local Disk C. ?
thanks
Marco.
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R
Roberto
Aug 4, 2005
"Marco" wrote in message
Improving performance in PS 7 ?

I got this message when I installed PS 7……..
You currently have Adobe Photoshop’s primary Scratch and Windows’ primary paging file on the same volume, which can result in reduced performance.

You are pretty much screwed if you have only one physical drive, but you can set up a partition on it (call it D). Some people claim it helps performance. I say it only obviates the annoying message you refer to.

Drives are cheap. If your system has controllers for more drives (and it probably does), add two to three more and enjoy a significant boost. (See Preferences – scratch discs)
BH
Bill Hilton
Aug 4, 2005
Marco

Does anyone know how to do this but I only have one drive which is Local Disk C. ?

If you only have one drive there’s not much you can do so just ignore the message. IIRC it goes away soon (or maybe there’s a way to turn it off in Preferences?). Installing a second drive (if that’s an option) speeds things up since you keep the program on one drive and can access your data on a second drive, but basically don’t worry about it if PS is running fast enough for your needs.

I ran some tests once on either V7 or CS comparing leaving the scratch drive on C, putting it on a USB external drive (slowest), on a Firewire external drive (slower), and on an internal hard drive (fastest). For the long action I ran it took over 5 minutes with a 2nd hard drive as scratch, 128% as long with C as the scratch (ie, no 2nd hard drive), 163% longer with a Firewire external drive, 240% longer using a USB external drive. You might get different numbers, depending on how much RAM you use and how fast your disks are, but these are likely fairly typical.

So if this is typical you’re slowing down by 25-30% without a 2nd hard drive, using C as scratch disk … don’t worry about it too much.

Bill
BH
Bill Hilton
Aug 4, 2005
you can set up a partition on it (call it D). Some people claim it helps performance. I say it only obviates the
annoying message you refer to.

I’ve heard that this can actually run slower because it ensures that the disk head must move a goodly amount every time the program switches between accessing code and accessing data, which would make sense. Never cared enough to run a test, but that’s what one hears. If anyone has run actual tests on this and would care to post I’d be interested in seeing it.

I say it only obviates the annoying message you refer to.

Yes, there’s that advantage 🙂

Bill
C
Caitlin
Aug 6, 2005
"johnboy" wrote in message
"Marco" wrote in message
Improving performance in PS 7 ?

I got this message when I installed PS 7……..
You currently have Adobe Photoshop’s primary Scratch and Windows’ primary paging file on the same volume, which can result in reduced performance.

You are pretty much screwed if you have only one physical drive, but you can set up a partition on it (call it D). Some people claim it helps performance. I say it only obviates the annoying message you refer to.
Drives are cheap. If your system has controllers for more drives (and it probably does), add two to three more and enjoy a significant boost. (See Preferences – scratch discs)

I’ve been wanting to ask this question – my C drive is a new NTFS drive, and my two slave drives are old FAT32 drives. Is it still worth having my scratch disks on one of the old drives when they are about 1/2 the speed?
BH
Bill Hilton
Aug 6, 2005
Caitlin asks …

my C drive is a new NTFS drive, and my two slave drives are old FAT32 drives. Is it still worth having my scratch disks on one of the old drives when they are about 1/2 the speed?

The easy way to find out is to create a longish action doing some typical steps on a large file and running it with your current setup, timing it carefully. The one I use runs Levels, a contrast Curve, Hue/Sat, USM, resizes and converts the profile on a 500 MB film scan, for example. Then go to Preferences and change the scratch drive to C and re-run the same action. This should answer your questions pretty fast. This is what I always do since the internet is usually full of people who will argue both pro and con all day long … nothing like a little hard data to clear the fog 🙂

Bill
H
Hecate
Aug 6, 2005
On Sat, 6 Aug 2005 19:29:21 +1000, "Caitlin"
wrote:

I’ve been wanting to ask this question – my C drive is a new NTFS drive, and my two slave drives are old FAT32 drives. Is it still worth having my scratch disks on one of the old drives when they are about 1/2 the speed?
Caitlin, reformat the drives – FAT32 is far more insecure and far more likely to scramble your data.

No reason why you shouldn’t have the scratch disk on one of them then. It’s all very well having fast disks, but if they’re attached to an older computer it’s likely the disk throughput won’t be much faster than the new disk because of the I/O bottleneck.

—

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N
noone
Aug 7, 2005
In article ,
says…
On Sat, 6 Aug 2005 19:29:21 +1000, "Caitlin"
wrote:

I’ve been wanting to ask this question – my C drive is a new NTFS drive, and my two slave drives are old FAT32 drives. Is it still worth having my scratch disks on one of the old drives when they are about 1/2 the speed?
Caitlin, reformat the drives – FAT32 is far more insecure and far more likely to scramble your data.

No reason why you shouldn’t have the scratch disk on one of them then. It’s all very well having fast disks, but if they’re attached to an older computer it’s likely the disk throughput won’t be much faster than the new disk because of the I/O bottleneck.

—

Hecate – The Real One

Fashion: Buying things you don’t need, with money
you don’t have, to impress people you don’t like…

A couple of other possible advantages are the file size capabilities of NTFS, and/or the # of files/directories allowable. I still keep a removable HDD, or two in FAT32, so I can hook ’em up to a WinME machine. I keep it around to run some old programs, like Painter 5, and some 3-D painting progs, that won’t run with over 512MB memory, or well under W2K, or XP. Other than those, and the SATA HDDs on that machine, all esle is NTFS.

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