Hi Tim,
I’ve no experience to offer regarding actual use of flash drives, but I’ll just offer that as most are in a sub-1GB size range, I tend to think they’d be of little value as a scratch disk. Of course that may also depend upon the size of image files you commonly work with. I’ve also read that while many devices are spec’ed as USB2, many still fail to give the max data transfer rate that is defined for USB2. Perhaps that is even why your external Seagate drive doesn’t seem as helpful as you’d have thought? My first suggestion is that you could buy a USB2 flash drive locally from some store with a customer-friendly return policy and simply try it out for comparison sake. The second suggestion, although I’m guessing you might’ve already considered it had your laptop provded the option, is that of adding a 2nd internal hard drive. By not mentioning that, I assume you don’t have such an option available to you. As for a 7200 rpm drive, I suspect that should help a noticeable amount over a 4200 rpm drive, but at the added cost of reduced battery life. Perhaps that’s acceptable to you, but just keep that in mind as a possible compromise.
One other idea…of merit or not, maybe someone else can offer an opinion…is to partition your laptop hard drive and define a 2GB or so partition for use only as your PS scratch disk. I’m thinking that if you’re using only a single partition on your drive, then fragmentation of the drive might affect the efficient use of the scratch disk. Isolating a partition for scratch disk use only would be less prone to impacts related to fragmentation. And, of course, periodically defragment the full drive whether it is partitioned or not.
Regards,
Daryl
I think upping your RAM might be more effective unless the files are so large that it would make no real difference.
I’m working on a brochure that is 7200 x 5400 pixels @ 300 DPI with lots of layers, and since I always work on my laptop I don’t know if it would be much better on a desktop computer. Once I have it open it’s not too bad speed-wise, but saving the file takes between five and ten minutes. Maybe you guys could tell me if slowness is just to be expected with a file this large (about 120MB on disk and growing). Thanks.
I have a Western Digital 7200 RPM 120 gb USB2 hard drive, and it is as slow as molasses compared to my internal drives, which are also 7200 RPM, so that may be your problem.
I wanted one that was Firewire and USB 2, but none were available in my area, and neither were there any Firewire ones at the time. Most of the time I leave the external drive off because it slows everything down.
I also have a Plextor DVD burner, which is dual USB 2 and Firewire. When I use the USB 2 connection, it seems about half as fast as when I use the firewire connection.
(My desktop has USB 2 but not Firewire, but my laptop has Firewire as well as USB 2. I went with the dual connection on the DVD burner because the hard drive was so slow).
Thanks for the info. The Seagate external USB2/Firewire drive I just bought came with a pamphlet that shows Firewire’s data transfer rate at 400 megabits per second and USB2’s rate at 480 MBS — theoretically faster, though who but Commander Data could tell the difference?
I do notice a slight performance increase when the Seagate is the scratch disk, but like I said not much. CS is just doing a lot of things at once, but I still wonder about how well it uses memory. Not to make the case for Paint Shop Pro again, but the latest version was a complete code rewrite, and PSP utilizes memory much better than it used to despite that it has much more functionality. I guess all of the hottest hardware in the world won’t make a difference if the code is written so as to not take advantage of it (not to say that this is what’s happening in CS).
Hi Tim,
I don’t know a lot about computers, but there is a reason why Firewire works faster than USB 2 sometimes, even though the data transfer rate is faster for USB.
I read about it several times, and it made a lot of sense. Too bad I didn’t retain the information in my brain!
I don’t think I’ll even try to print what I sort of remember, because I’ll probably get it all wrong. 🙂
I did some searching and found evidence to support what you said about Firewire being faster than USB2. I will experiment with it myself and see if it makes an appreciable difference and then post the results here. Thanks.
Well, I connected the Seagate drive to the notebook with a Firewire connection and set it as the scratch disk, and there was no noticeable difference in PS performance. (I also did some basic file copying and, again, didn’t see an improvement over using the same drive with a USB2 connection.)
I see that a lot of folks here have 1GB or more of memory, and I think that this is the only real way to squeeze out as much performance as possible from PS, i.e., to keep it from paging to disk as much as possible. If I decide to spend the $300 or so to bump my laptop up to one full gig of RAM, I will add the results of that test to this string.
Thanks for your tests Tim. Maybe my results were different because I am going through a hub, (Belkin USB 2), and I have other devices plugged into the hub as well. (One of them is my printer, which is USB 1).
There are performance issues with some devices and hubs, and also issues with too many things plugged in that way or something.
I don’t remember all those details either, but I’ve read that several times, and just retained enough to remember that if I have any real problems, that I should plug the device directly into the computer’s ports.
Have you tried adjusting memory usage in the Photoshop preferences? I bumped mine up to 75 percent and it made a difference on my Dell desktop.
I have mine set to 100 percent since I never have anything else running when I’m using PS, and that gives it just over 400MB of dedicated memory. I’ve also tried just about every possible scratch disk configuration and haven’t seen a difference. I’m hopeful that doubling the RAM up to a gig will make a difference (just ordered it from Kingston).
For the heck of it, I ran a test with this same 225MB file using PS7 on my desktop computer, and it was nearly as slow to open, save, or navigate the file as my laptop is. The desktop PC is 1+ GHz, 512 RAM and has two, 7200 RPM drives in it, and it flies through everything else I use it for including Bryce 3D. That’s why I get the feeling that it is PS itself that is the weak link, so to speak, and that the program code can’t process things as quickly as the computer would like it to.
I’m not a Photoshop basher — it’s a great application — but recent versions feel "bloated", like it’s trying to do too much at once. Ever watch the file browser struggling to create thumbnails — what’s up with that?
Tim – Check past threads about memory allocation and FAQ and you will find that even when running only PS you should never set your memory beyond 50% When you set it at 100% you are taking away resources from your machine which is needed elsewhere!
If you do some further research you will find that Adobe may recommend, lets say 512 MB of RAM as a minimum to run PS, but you will find that actual "real time" RAM should be 3-4 times that amount. PS is a memory hog!
You don’t indicate how experianced you are with PS, so I don’t mean to insult your intellegence but there are several good books and sites out there that address this very issue. I will admitt I am using PS 7 and not CS. Inside PS 7 by Newriders is one good source as well as Photoshop User by NAPP, that talk about memory and processing.
I am using a PC with a Pent. 4 Chip, 3.04 GH processor, 2 GB RAM, 2 RAID 80 GB 7200 rpm HDs and 1 200 GB 7200 rpm HD for scratch disk and often have images in the file size of 80 MB and up, with numerous layers and the machine breezes!
I know several individuals who are running PS CS on very similar machines like mine. Two did upgrades and have all kinds of problems and three did full installs and their machines are running great.
Go figure!
I thought I would pass this along…
I have a 1GB IBM Microdrive and PC card adapter, and I wondered if PS would use it as a scratch disk. I found that PS doesn’t recognize it as a disk drive which is both surprising and disappointing. It will read it fine for opening and saving files, but it doesn’t appear in the list of drives on the scratch disk options page.
Every other program I use (including Diskeeper, Partition Magic, and even the Disk Management feature in Windows XP) recognizes the Microdrive as a "real" hard drive which it is albeit in a small form factor.
Not that anyone would really want to "scratch" to it, but as the mobile market grows and, along with it, the availability of faster "second" hard drives for the PC card slot (like Kingston’s 5GB DataPak), it would be nice to have the option.
UPDATE: I installed the one gigabyte of RAM in my Presario 2570, and the difference is quite noticeable. Now, instead of the Efficiency percentage showing 20-30%, it’s between 98-100% — nice! Opening and saving the 175MB file is also much quicker. Say it with me…
It’s the RAM, stupid!
Hello everyone, I am using PS CS. But for some reason, I am not being allowed to save anything that I do in PS and/or change effects that I make with the open file that I am working on.
I get a message that my scratch disc is set to my start up and that it needs to be change. I went to preferences to change. But I only have the options of C:/ and startup. I would like to designate my 750MB zip drive as the scratch disk, but it is not listed or recognized in the drop down menu of choices. I can only chose between the C:/ and startup.
Help? How can change the designation for my scratch disk?
Can’t do it, PS won’t allow scratch set to removeable media drive. Just set for C:\
Zip drive too slow anyway.
Mac
Ren,
I get a message that my scratch disc is set to my start up and that it
needs to be change<<
That message is advisory only. Better performance will be obtained with the scratch and the window’s paging file on different drives, but that is all. It won’t cause you any problems (unless you are tight on disk space on your C: drive)
As Mac has indicated, removable drives are not permitted to be used as scratch drives and a zip drive would be FAR too slow and would make using Photoshop just about impossible.
Actually, PS CS does recognize my external USB2 hard drive as a scratch disk, though I haven’t noticed a tremendous difference over using a separate partition on my internal hard drive, even when the external drive is using the Firewire connection as opposed to USB2. But we’re talking about a laptop here, and even though it’s a Pentium 4 2+ GHz it’s still not the same architecture as a desktop PC.
One thing I am learning is to be a little more patient. We’ve gotten so spoiled that even a few extra seconds seems like an eternity.
though I haven’t noticed a tremendous difference over using a separate partition on my internal hard drive,
you won’t. it’s negligable unless you’re doing really complex things on HUGE files. If you’re woking with 20-100 meg files you probably won’t notice unless one drive is WAAAAAAAAY slower than another.
