I don’t think having the Photoshop program on a disk, or partition other than the OS would make any significant difference; especially if there’s adequate RAM, & Scratch Disk space
Placing the Scratch Disk on a different Drive or partition is generally accepted to make a difference, however.
Leigh
Ron,
I know of no reason to have your programs disk on a physically separate hard drive, and yet there may be a reason not to…activation. It may not even matter there, but for those applications requiring activation where some data may be written to a hidden hard drive area or just some obscure place, I personally favor the idea of the O/S and progams all being on the same physical hard drive, so that I build a full image of that hard drive, including boot sector, for recovery purposes. That may be all that is needed to avoid having to reactivate, although such as with Photoshop, it is possible a repair activation might still be needed. In any case, I just take this approach as a preventative measure.
Regards,
Daryl
if you have to re-install the OS, it does not wipe out your programmes
Not so. Even if you did install PS on another disc, many many crucial files would be written to the system disc and the registry. So reinstalling the OS would wipe out Photoshop.
Many people have relatively small OS disks. If they put all their programs on the OS disk and kept the default My Documents folder on the OS disk, their OS disk would fill up very fast. I have a 76 GB Raptor SE16 SATA as my C: drive (OS). I pointed my My Documents folder to the D: drive when I installed Windows XP. I also decided to use the E: drive for image files. Even so, I have installed innumerable apps on the D: drive under d:\Program Files to conserve C drive space. This includes games and Photoshop and Lightroom. For the most part, the programs I install on C: are those that are too clueless to give me a choice, and those that are small.
Michael’s comment led me to re-reading the original post, where I allowed the mention of a separate drive to skew my thoughts toward a physical drive as opposed to simply another drive letter, i.e., partition. So, while I my reply was focused more on the aspect of installing to a physically separate hard drive, I’ll just echo Michael in saying that you may well find you like having major apps installed to a separate partition of the same hard drive that your system partition resides on, but the choice is purely one of preference in how you manage your system, hard drives, etc.
Personally, I follow an approach similar to Michael, with an O/S partition (two actually, for XP & Vista) to which I also install all utility apps and smaller, useful apps, as well as MS Office (the large app exception here). Then, I have a second Programs partition that most of my larger applications get installed to. A third partition for "Primary Data" may be on the same or a separate physical drive, and contains the files which I’ve redirected My Documents, Favorites, e-mail folders, etc. to. I used to make that last partition always a separate hard drive, on the premise that it would not be exercised as often as the system drive, and thus might be less prone to failure. Nowadays I don’t worry so much about that since I have a scheduled backup that runs and minimizes the risk of data loss.
Daryl
The best option really depends on where your swap files are set to. That is where PS will slow down. If your swap file, PS and it’s temp files are on the same disk it will cause a slow down as all three can be being accessed at the same time.
Generally I set my memory swap file on a separate physical drive to my OS and program files. If possible I also set the temp files to another drive again. Given my system is also an edit system thats not too much of a problem (I’ve got 4 drives with 2 in raid). I tend to set them in the following order, Swap to the fastest, OS to the next and Temp files (usually the least used) to the slowest.
What about the Scratch disk settings?
I have a related question, as I’m about to invest in a new computer. I’m thinking about getting a 76 GB Raptor 10.000RPM drive and a 500GB Sata2 7.200RPM drive.
But how should I configure it? Should I put Windows and swapfile on the Raptor, or should I reserve it for Photoshop scratch disk?
I should have been clearer. when I said adobe temp files I ment the scratch disks setting in PS etc, swap file ment the windows virtual memory swap file.
As for the above post, it really depends on what you else you are doing with the system other than Photoshop. You’ll get better performance out of a RAID 0 with 2 (or more) 7200RPM drives than 1 10k RPM drive with more storage and cheaper. But this will be less reliable in the long run (that said I havn’t had a failure in the 4 years I’ve been running a raid 0 but if I did there is no recovery). Drive performance isn’t a huge consideration with Photoshop for the most part unless your batch processing large numbers of photos. More memory in general use is more beneficial than faster drives.
mind you the new raptors with the window in the side look Insanely cool….
Well, I could certainly go with a raid 0 setup if that’ll give me the same boost as a Raptor. I just need to be clear.
I’m not very experienced with raid. Does raid 0 effectively double up access time?
I’ve been wondering over the fact that the Raptors are SATA, whereas all the other drives are SATAII.
