Tom,

Not to the point you would ever see a difference unless the other drive is faster. Sometimes it just isn't worth it. You will just end up like Deebs... overthinking something until you eventually go insane :)

There are just too many apps that write temporary data to the drive. Personally I don't want to have to buy a high speed drive to use for one very small chunk of data.

Do you really want to end up needing a 500W power supply and 7 drives to have a mess like this...

Drive 1: OS & Apps
Drive 2: Photoshop Scratch
Drive 3: Windows Swap
Drive 4: System Temp
Drive 5: Data
Drive 6: Data (Because you are wasting perfectly good drives for virtual memory) Drive 7: Data (Because you are wasting perfectly good drives for virtual memory)

There are times where people need the most a system can give them. Where it is worth every cent for that extra 3% performance boost. Then there are times where based on the files you work on you will never see a difference after spending your time and money setting it up.

My system has...

Drive 1: OS, Apps, Windows Swap, System Temp & Photoshop Scratch Drive 2: Data
Drive 3: Data

Drive 1: is going to get hammered the most and it has a disk image backup. I can do a low level reformat and load a disk image in under 10 minutes and have a clean system drive without worrying about loosing anything or waiting to defrag. I also don't have to worry about fragmenting my data drives as much with temp files constantly being written to them.

For the size of files I work with I am never going to notice if it takes 1/10TH of a second less time to do something. I have done 2 10'x10' displays where it would have been nice to get a little more speed out of my system, but in those cases money was worth more than time.

Note: If I worked on very large files all the time I would have a much different setup. Most likely consisting of 2 high speed drives for the OS, Apps, Swap & PS scratch. With a 4 disk raid 5 configuration for data (4th disk being a hot spare).

If you need the best performance possible, buy as much RAM as you can afford and the fastest hard drives you can afford. I am not saying you should go out and buy 15,000 RPM drives. But 10K over 7200 would be much more noticable than spreading temp files over several drives. If you have multiple drives of the same speed separate the swap and scratch. What people shouldn't do is read that a second drive for scratch is better and decide to put an old 10GB 5400 RPM drive in their system to use for a scratch disk.

Just use common sense and be aware of what is happening in the background and do what will work best for your workflow and your pocketbook.

Tom_McDanel

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Which disk to use as scratch disk?