NEED HELP WITH SCRATCHDISK

ML
Posted By
Miguel_Luna
Aug 23, 2004
Views
216
Replies
2
Status
Closed
Hello,
I’m getting ready to purchase a new computer and I want to find the cheapest hard drive configuration with the fastest results.

I mostly use photoshop and the biggest my files have gotten are around 250mb.

I wanted to know if it would be better to use raid 0 on two 160 drives or to just get one large drive.

Also, is it possible to create an extra partition on the single big drive of say 15 or 20gb and use that as my scratch? will that work?

One more thing about the raid configuration… is it enough to have the raid config. at a normal striping or do i need to create an extra virtual array to use as scratch?

I plan to buy only 1 gig or ram…is it worth it to get more?

Thanks to who ever can help with this one… Im pretty lost!!
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Y
YrbkMgr
Aug 23, 2004
Miguel,

Here’s the most important concept to keep in mind. Photoshop doesn’t work entirely like many windows programs. Photoshop relies heeavily on the scratch disk. When shopping for a new system, if you’re interested in optimizing it for photoshop, focus on I/O with the hard drive.

So, will a raid work? Yes.

Does it make sense to partition a main drive and dedicate it to photoshop? No. Here’s why…

When you partition your drive you will not be able to access two partitions on the same drive simultaneously. So all windows swapfile operations or other HD operations have to go in queue while you’re writing to the scratch disk and vice versa.

If you only have one drive, there’s no advantage to partitioning it for swap file optimization. It is far better to have a second drive, not necessarily dedicated to photoshop, but with plenty of free space so that fragmentation is less of an issue.

But in having a second drive, a lot of the advantage lies with the specific configuration. Here again, I’m referring to I/O. Two drives on the same controller move the bottleneck from read/write operations to "bus" issues – data transfer. Frankly, I would rather have that as my bottleneck, if I were going to have one.

In regards to RAID, in truth, I don’t know a lot about them except the basic principles, but I know people use them with photoshop, so I will let others comment on the probity of raid v. ATA/SATA.

As it relates to the RAM question, a GIG is plenty, where Photoshop is concerned. Again, the biggest lags will come from HD read/writes when ps uses the scratch disk.

Peace,
Tony
DA
Doug_Abdelnour
Aug 25, 2004
I absolutely recommend the fastest hard drive around for the SWAP drive, and this often means using a RAID ARRAY – "RAID-O".
Raid-O is often used in video set ups where fast throughput is paramount. In Photoshop, I usually set uo 203 fast drive (SCSI 10K or 15K Seagate Cheetahs, for instance, on a RAID controller (try the Apaptec 29329-R or 29320-RA at not too much money for a SCSI system).
Photoshop seems to use the scratch disk for more than I understand, but if you are creating files up to 250MBs, you’ll need at least 2 gigs system RAM and a fast swap drive. If you don’t want to pay for the SCSI drives, try two SATA or ATA striped to RAID-0.
If you need more specifics, send me an email.

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