scratch disk full

MA
Posted By
Mal_Austin
Jun 4, 2005
Views
382
Replies
9
Status
Closed
This is a problem that i have not been able to fix for over a year. Thought after recent upgrade it might disappear not so. When trying large scans or having more than about 800mb of images on screen and trying to do an action like healing, with no other programs open I get that wretched "unable to do action as scratch disks are full" message yet I know that it is NOT! I have a dedicated 30gb empty drive placed on the first scratch disk folder in preferences. I know that what I am asking PS to do should need nowhere near this space. Windows XP 2.4MHZ. 1012 ram 70% allocated to PS. Windows memory is set to initial 2560 and max 3270
Mal
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disk full scratch

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B
birdman
Jun 4, 2005
I think you are expecting too much of your computer, Photoshop and the computer operating system.

An old general rule about PS is that you need 5x the mbs in ram as the size of your files (may or may not be true). If you really need to have 800mbs of image data open at one time this would mean you need 4gbs of RAM. Also your CPU is far too slow to handle this volume of data. Pentium 4 cpus do not become efficient at handling large volumes of data until you exceed 3ghz in cpu speed-this is why Athlon CPUs running at slower clock speeds were actually faster than P4s running at higher clock speeds until you get to P4s at the 3-3.2ghz speed. The deep P4 pipelines make alot data handling errors that are not covered up until the brute speed of the cpu reaches a certain minimum.

Additionally there are a limited number of pointers for data in memory, whether in RAM or on a scratch disk. I would presume with 800mbs of data open you have exceeded this limit. This is as much a fundamental limit of Windows (all versions of Windows have the heaps and stacks issue) and, for all I know, all computer operating systems. The new Linux based version of the Mac OS may be better but until then Macs actually had a worse memory structure than Windows.

Perhaps you need to re-evaluate the way you work in Photoshop. Do you really need that much data open at one time?
Y
YrbkMgr
Jun 4, 2005
I have a dedicated 30gb empty drive placed on the first scratch disk folder in preferences.

Standard IDE HD? Partitioned? Are you sure that it is the one being used as the scratch? How are you sure that there’s plenty of free space – windows reporting it?

Stupid question, I know, but just checking.
C
chrisjbirchall
Jun 4, 2005
If your computer is closed down, or crashes, without first closing Photoshop, some pretty big temporary files will remain on the scratch disk. Set explorer to shown hidden files to search out and delete them.

Chris.
MA
Mal_Austin
Jun 6, 2005
thanks. yes standard ide. I have 3 drives 2x80gb are mirrored with a promise raid controller and are my main drives. the scratch disk is the 3rd and dedicated drive. It was formatted originally, has never been used for anything else and i regularly check it for files. It once had about 6Gb of temp files on it which i removed but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
L
LenHewitt
Jun 6, 2005
Mal,

I believe there have been a few reports of problems with some RAID set-ups. It could be you are one of the few who are affected.
MA
Mal_Austin
Jun 8, 2005
oh great – so how do i find if that is true?
L
LenHewitt
Jun 8, 2005
so how do i find if that is true<<

The obvious way would be to make your primary scratch non-RAID
MA
Mal_Austin
Jun 10, 2005
Thanks Len but it is! The 2 80Gb are linked by raid and are are used as the windows memory but the separate 30Gb is not linked by raid and is totally empty and is entered as "First" in the scratch disk preferences. I have also reduced the content of the main drives by 50% but none of this has made any difference. It gets really annoying at how long Photoshop is taking to do things eg tonight I have been working on a 169mb imagesplit into 2 layers. Flattening took so long I had to walk away. Ridiculous!

How do I get definitive info from Adobe that CS8 doesn’t like Raid?
DG
Dana_Gartenlaub
Jun 10, 2005
First off, do a search on all drives for *.tmp files. Delete them, totally (not just throw them in the Recycle Bin). See if that frees up space on your drives.

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