USB flash / pen drive as scratch disk?

AR
Posted By
Andrew_Ridge
Aug 3, 2007
Views
278
Replies
2
Status
Closed
Hello, this question has been asked a few times before but never actually answered:

Regardless of the wisdom of doing so, is it at all possible to use such a drive as a scratch disk? Photoshop CS3 does not recognise it on my system at present.

Thanks,

Andrew.
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disk drive flash pen scratch usb

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Jim_Oblak
Aug 3, 2007
The write speed of flash storage media is typically really poor. If you absolutely must use an external drive for scratch, use a true hard drive that spins and a USB2 or IEEE 1394 (firewire, ilink) connection.
DP
Daryl_Pritchard
Aug 4, 2007
Even an external USB2 or Firewire drive will be a bad choice as a scratch disk. I was unaware of that when I specifially built up a 7200rpm USB2/Firewire external portable drive for my Dell laptop back in 2004. Use of the drive as a scratch disk reduced performance significantly (30-40%, maybe more) over just using the single internal drive. The best bet for external drives is probably an eSATA, external IDE, or external SCSI drive, all of which have the same bus performance as internal drives (as far as I know).

Regards,

Daryl

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