Laptop and scratch disk

HG
Posted By
Howard_Gebeaux
Sep 5, 2007
Views
261
Replies
2
Status
Closed
I have searched for answers to this. There seem to be many, but all dealing with other issues. So, I thought I’d ask it.

My concern is that I’m upgrading my laptop so I will be able to work in CS3 "on the road." I’m getting:
Gateway NX860XL
VISTA
Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
2 GHz, 667 MHz
2 Gig RAM
160 GB HD, 5400 rpm
nVidia 7900 256 MB graphics card

So, my question concerns how do I set up a scratch disk. Because there is only the one internal drive, and because everything else on this forum indicates that an external USB-connected drive used as a scratch disk will only slow things down, I’m assuming I will have to use the one internal drive for both my OS and as my scratch disk, even thought Adobe recommends against this.

I am thinking that if I keep my data on an external drive rather than filling up my internal hard drive, I might be OK.

I am also thinking I should partition my internal hard drive, setting up a partition for the scratch disk. Would that help? And if so, what is the size I should use?

I already feel that the hard drive I’ve ordered is too slow, and that a 7200 RPM drive would be a lot better. I’m looking into changing that. Would that improve the scratch disk performance? (logically, it seems like it would)

So, I guess I’m just looking for suggestions on this, wondering how others have worked it out, and what works.

thanks
Howard
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JJ
John_Joslin
Sep 5, 2007
Providing you are not doing any heavy duty processing everything will work fine if you just nominate the internal drive as scratch disk. That’s what I have on my laptop.

Partitioning won’t bring much if the disk is kept defragmented.

In general, higher rpm means faster. (Look at the specs.)
C
chrisjbirchall
Sep 5, 2007
am thinking that if I keep my data on an external drive rather than filling up my internal hard drive…

What John said.

Also:

Your "work in progress" should be on the internal drive for quicker read/write times. Regularly move finished files to the External for storage. This way you can keep the main HD uncluttered. A hard drive works fastest when it is less than half full.

Defrag regularly. A couple of times a week and especially after you’ve archived off a large number of files.

Set your Windows Paging File (Virtual Memory) to a fixed size. Min=Max=4GB.

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