I just bought a FLASH USB HD 4GB to use as a scratch disk for PS CS2. I open PREFERANCES and PLUGINS-SCRATCH and cannot find my flash HD, why is that? can someone please help……..
Because the scratch disk set-up is vital to Photoshop’s performance, it should always be located on an internal drive – preferably a separate physical drive to the one containing the OS and with plenty of free, contiguous, defragmented space.
An external drive will never be fast enough. Also, 4GB is barely enough space, especially if you are going to be working on large multi layered files and/or have more than one open at a time.
Indeed…As I originally failed to think how slow a USB2 or 1394 connection was as compared to an ATA or SATA hard drive interface, I built up an external USB2/1394 portable 7200rpm hard drive for my laptop. Using that as a scratch disk vs. using only the single internal hard drive halved the performance of PS CS2. That is, tasks on moderate-size files of 50MB or so were easily taking twice as long to complete. Lesson learned.
chrisjbirchall, you may have forgotten external SCSI drives; I have an IBM 36 GB SCSI, 10K revs/min, scratch HD on Adaptec 19160 card; it produces a terrific whistling noise but presents no bottleneck for PS CS2.
Well sure, there are also desktop RAID arrays. But the OP was asking about a USB drive of some nature, probably a USB key given the size of it. He’s lucky PS refused to see it.
