I’m not using 2 GB on the C:. I’m using 2 MB. That’s because XP Pro won’t let me go any smaller.
I’m not using SATA II because I don’t have any drives that are SATA II. Well, it doesn’t recognize them as SATA II anyway. As far as I know they aren’t either.
If my aging memory serves, even the 10K Raptor HD is only just about fast enough for the 150 Mb/sec SATA I. So, the 300 speed of SATA II wouldn’t be used anyway.
BTW, right after writing this, my new Asus A8R-MVP board started getting really crazy. It was all over the place. Upon further review, this board seems to be a piece of badly engineered junk. Don’t buy one. I took mine back. I now have a very stable MSI A8N Neo4 Platinum mobo that seems great.
You aren’t going to get you CS2 running much faster. A Raptor will make a bit of a difference. If you really want a fast Photoshop scratch disk, put two of them together in a RAID 0. I can’t say if that is worth it or not though.
Don’t forget that your fastest drives are still the SCSI drives. Of course, you need the bus speed to really use it.
Have you overclocked that X2 4400+? It should overclock very nicely to 10-20% – if you do it right. That would show noticeable speed improvement too. 10% should get you faster than a 4800+ and be very stable. Don’t blow the rest of the system up though and have a very good heatsink/fan.
Clyde
Bill Phillips wrote:
I’m intrigued by how you use the Raptor 37 for the swap file and Photoshop scratch disk. It sounds great.
A couple of questions if you don’t mind. Are you using a 2 GB swap file on your C drive and another 4 GB on your Raptor? Also, why not use the faster SATA II instead of SATA 1?
I have a fairly powerful system and would like to get my Photoshop CS2 to run faster. Asus A8N-SLI Premium, 2 GB DDR400 Crucial Dual channel memory, AMD 64 X2 4400, ASUS Nvidia GeForce 6600 and two Seagate 400 GB SATA 7200 RPM hard drives.
Thanks,
Bill
"Clyde" wrote in message
Sundance Kid wrote:
I’m using Windows XP. I’ve read that it can be a good idea to put the windows swap file (pagefile.sys) onto a second hard drive to increase performance in Windows. Photoshop’s scratch disk also functions best if placed on a second hard drive. My question is, If I only have two hard drives, what would be the best approach? Place the windows swap file on its own partition on HDD 1, and use a partition on HDD 2 for the Photoshop scratch disk?
I’ve searched for answers on Google, but I can’t seem to find anything specifically addressing this question.
I’m wondering how others have set up their drives…
I’m open to suggestions.
Thanks
I have a large Seagate HD for my system, apps, and data. I have a WD Raptor 37 GB 10K drive for Windows’ pagefile AND for Photoshop CS2’s Scratch disk. It works great.
I set XP Pro to have a fixed swap size of the maximum 4 GB on the Raptor. The minimum of 2 MB is on the system disk. This makes XP allocate all the space it needs before Photoshop starts up. Then Photoshop gets to use the rest of the drive for itself. Their needs don’t really overlap much. When I’m using Photoshop, I usually not swapping a bunch of other apps in and out of RAM.
[I use no partitions at all. Well, each disk is one partition. Don’t bother to make a partition for any swap/scratch file. The thing that makes it faster on another disk is the separate moving heads and the transfer electronics. With things on the same HD but different partitions, the same moving heads and electronics are use for all partitions. On two drives, they can be working at the same time. Partitions do nothing to speed up hardware; which is what you are trying to do. Partitions are just an organizational tool that is much more inflexible than folders. OK, they don’t get fragmented, but neither do mine.]
This runs MUCH faster on this very fast HD. I very much recommend this as a way to run Photoshop.
Both HDs are SATA, but only use SATA I and not the faster SATA II. I have 2 GB of dual channel RAM. I ran this setup on my Intel mobo with the P4
3.2 GHz processor. I am now running the same setup with an Asus A8R-MVP
mobo and the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ overclocked to 2.4 GHz. It works great this way too.
Actually, this new setup REALLY makes CS2 snap. Everything seems almost instant. This is fun again.
Clyde
