I have two hard drives, one fast and one faster. The fast disk has the Windows XP operating system on it. Which disk should have Photoshop CS and which should be designated the Scratch Disk? I have plenty of disk space and 2 gig memory with a fast Pentium 3.2 chip.
I have two hard drives, one fast and one faster. The fast disk has the
Windows XP operating system on it. Which disk should have Photoshop CS and which should be designated the Scratch Disk? I have plenty of disk space and 2 gig memory with a fast Pentium 3.2 chip. If they were the same speed, the answer would be easy. Perhaps you should try both configurations and select the one which performs best. Jim
It could be a tough call. The accepted answer would be the one without the swap file. However I am not sure how much the Windows swap file does while Photoshop is running. One could assume that the swap would only be used when switching between multiple programs. Does Photoshop use scratch for application overhead and image buffering or is it only for the open files and the processing could still be done in the memory space allocated to windows? I am not sure any of the Adobe people have ever said for sure.
The two reasons for having the scratch disk on a separate drive from the OS are speed and to limit fragmentation on your primary drive.
Most likely you will want it on the drive without the swap file.
As a general response I’d suggest using the other drive. Multiple apps would benefit from using swap on one drive and scratch on another.
Incidentally, this is where linux really gives a good understanding (IMHO) of the way a computer runs. For example: – operation system and application programs prefer drive C: – Windows swap is best on another disk – Photoshop scratch is best on another disk and – user data may be better on another disk too
(All IMHO – even partitioning a platter may not give an easily noticeable improvement in speed and assuming that optimising is important without having to venture into overclocking territory)
After a re-think and purely on speculation based on a 4 hard drive configuration: 1: application software and operating system 2: windows swap 3: Photoshop scratch and non-graphical user data 4: image data
I have a question regarding this scratch disc issue as it pertains to external hard discs. Can a Photoshop user get decent scratch disc performance via an external hard disc connected via Firewire 400 or USB 2.0?
I have a new Dell notebook PC. It has a pretty fast 7200RPM 60GB Hitachi hard disc and Photoshop works pretty well with it. I’m about to get the CS2 upgrade and I’m pondering the idea of using an external drive for scratch disc functions (as well as saving really huge files).
This message is for Dave as I really value your commentsto posts. As I reveal my ignorance what is the operating systems swap file? I’ve asked others and never can understand. Thanks!
a swap file is a place on the hard drive that the operating system (windows) uses to "swap" stuff out of memory to make room for more important stuff, to speed things up it wants the important stuff in memory and the not so important stuff can go back to disk. if it needs it again, it reads it back into memory.
a scratch file that photoshop uses is simililar to the windows swap file, except it’s only used by photoshop.
the reason it’s best to put the windows swap file and the photoshop scratch file on seperate hard drives (not just seperate partitions on the same hard drive!) is if photoshop and windows both want to hit their files at the same time, one of them is gonna have to wait. if they’re on seperate physical drives, both can hit the disk at the same time.
I’m running 3 hard drives…I have the photoshop scratch file on a different drive then the operating system…is moving the windows paging file to the third drive going to speed things up…is that the windows swap file? Tom
1 – operating system and application software 2 – Photoshop scratch file and non-Photoshop user data 3 – Windows swap file and Photoshop user data (eg images)
would return a performance boost?
I think (disclaimer alert) that the optimised Windows swap file is given as Max = Min = twice available RAM.
Whether this holds in such a multi-disk arrangement is beyond my ken but it would (will?) be the starting point (or datum) from which to tweak.
Not to the point you would ever see a difference unless the other drive is faster. Sometimes it just isn’t worth it. You will just end up like Deebs… overthinking something until you eventually go insane 🙂
There are just too many apps that write temporary data to the drive. Personally I don’t want to have to buy a high speed drive to use for one very small chunk of data.
Do you really want to end up needing a 500W power supply and 7 drives to have a mess like this…
Drive 1: OS & Apps Drive 2: Photoshop Scratch Drive 3: Windows Swap Drive 4: System Temp Drive 5: Data Drive 6: Data (Because you are wasting perfectly good drives for virtual memory) Drive 7: Data (Because you are wasting perfectly good drives for virtual memory)
There are times where people need the most a system can give them. Where it is worth every cent for that extra 3% performance boost. Then there are times where based on the files you work on you will never see a difference after spending your time and money setting it up.
My system has…
Drive 1: OS, Apps, Windows Swap, System Temp & Photoshop Scratch Drive 2: Data Drive 3: Data
Drive 1: is going to get hammered the most and it has a disk image backup. I can do a low level reformat and load a disk image in under 10 minutes and have a clean system drive without worrying about loosing anything or waiting to defrag. I also don’t have to worry about fragmenting my data drives as much with temp files constantly being written to them.
For the size of files I work with I am never going to notice if it takes 1/10TH of a second less time to do something. I have done 2 10’x10′ displays where it would have been nice to get a little more speed out of my system, but in those cases money was worth more than time.
Note: If I worked on very large files all the time I would have a much different setup. Most likely consisting of 2 high speed drives for the OS, Apps, Swap & PS scratch. With a 4 disk raid 5 configuration for data (4th disk being a hot spare).
If you need the best performance possible, buy as much RAM as you can afford and the fastest hard drives you can afford. I am not saying you should go out and buy 15,000 RPM drives. But 10K over 7200 would be much more noticable than spreading temp files over several drives. If you have multiple drives of the same speed separate the swap and scratch. What people shouldn’t do is read that a second drive for scratch is better and decide to put an old 10GB 5400 RPM drive in their system to use for a scratch disk.
Just use common sense and be aware of what is happening in the background and do what will work best for your workflow and your pocketbook.
I kept off RAID because I heard it could cause problems.
There are several possible problems with a RAID. One big one for Photoshop is that they read much slower than they write. So for large files that you save often they are great but for scratch disks a single drive is often times better. Another problem is the controller itself. If it goes bad you can easily loose everything, even if it doesn’t kill the drives when it goes bad, just by not remembering your settings when you get a new controller. We use them for our servers where 50 or more people might be accessing files at once.
It is kind of like having a high dollar car. They are nice and fast and everyone wants one until something goes wrong and it needs fixed.
Thanks everyone for such enlightened responses. As a reply to Photo Help, my main drive with Win XP op sys, data, and programs is 160 gig 7200 rev SATA. My second drive with the PS scratch files is 75 gig 10,000 rpm SATA. (Raptor trade name)
Based on info everyone has so kindly offered, I will keep scratch on second drive.
Should I leave PS data, specifically photographs, this is how I use photoshop exclusively, on main drive or would it speed up if I placed them on second 10,000 rev drive.
Your second drive is much faster so loading and saving files could speed up by as much as 50%. However if the files are small it would only speed up by fractions of a second and perhaps not even be noticable.
What else are you using the second drive for right now? I hope you are at least capturing video or something other than just a PS Scratch Disk.
I am not using it for anything as of yet. I purchased it with the idea of putting all files related to Photoshop or just data files or just Photoshop images. I have not decided how to use it to best utilize its capabilities. This computer is strictly a Photography Studio working station. Nothing is on it that is not related to my business. I am not hooked to Internet nor networked so it stays pure.
I am just looking for ideas to make work move faster. Computer is being used 100% during store hours.
I really depends entirely on how you use your system. With the faster drive as the primary the system will boot faster and applications will load faster. If the system is almost always on and you keep Photoshop up and running all the time this would not be a major benefit.
Using it as the scratch disk and data drive should work well for your situation.
Having Data and scratch on the same hard drive is not always the best idea.
The greatest bottleneck when working on very large files is Saving to Disk.
The file you are editing will reside part in ram and part in scratch. So when you go to save this file, the same head that is writing it to the data partition will also be reading parts of the open file from the scratch partition at the same time. This read/write conflict can slow down your workflow considerably when working on large files.
If you’re not in the habit of hauling multi-layered monsters around in Photoshop however, this won’t be a problem.
I run a Portrait Studio myself, and I can tell you there is nothing worse than sitting there watching that damn egg-timer every time you save a file! In my opinion, having a separate scratch disk with little else on it (save for a partition containing archive material) is not a wasteful luxury – it’s a downright necessity!
Once I get the machine settled down I’ll give CS2 a tryout and report back here
I do miss aspects of CS2: noise filters for a start – however, on the laptop I find it difficuly not using high priority on photoshop exe. It just runs so sweet
