Photoshop Primary Scratch & Windows Primary Paging File

J
Posted By
JOANNEWOOLDRIDGE
Dec 8, 2003
Views
2241
Replies
6
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Closed
I just installed photoshop and the 1st time I ran the program I received this message: ‘You currently have Adobe Photoshops primary scratch & Windows primary paging file on the same volume which can result in reduced performance. It is recomended that you set photoshops primary scratch on a different volume.’ I know a little about computers – but am no expert – I would need the advice in laymans terms.
Related Tags
file page scratch windows

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RL
Robert_Levine
Dec 8, 2003
If all you have is one unpartitioned harddrive just ignore it. It’s more informational than anything else. If you have two harddrives, come on back and we’ll talk you through the setup.

Bob
K
ktkneller
Dec 12, 2003
Hey Robert,
I have the same question, but I do have 2 hard drives.
My question also includes, ps also recommends that the scartch disk be on a different drive than any large images being worked with.

My situation is the second drive holds all my images.
PH
Photo_Help
Dec 12, 2003
ktkneller,

Chances are you need not worry about it. What is the largest file size you work with? In most cases you won’t see a bit of difference. Depending on your system configuration you could just as easily slow things down by moving the scratch disk location. We have seen people here that saw the notice during setup and put an old drive in so they can use it for the scratch disk. Now instead of using a brand new reliable drive that wasn’t using it’s full bandwidth they are using an old drive that is 1/3 the speed and in some cases slowing down the primary drive.

Most of the people that recommend you to move files around on your drive to get the best configuration possible have never seen any indication that they have gained anything.

Depending on how you use your system Photoshop may not even deal with the largest files or most overhead. The same people that go out of their way to move the Photoshop scratch disk location to work on 5 MB images for web sites don’t think twice about opening 30MB Power Point presentations that generate much larger temporary files.

Whatever you do just use common sense. If you are working on very large files and trying anything you can to get every ounce of speed and power out of your machine go for it. However "if it ain’t broke don’t fix it" is more often than not good advise.
SB
Scott_Byer
Dec 12, 2003
It’s more important to have the scratch on a separate physical drive than the system paging file when working on large files. You can have it on the same disk as your images, but at that point I’d recommend partitioning that disk to avoid framentation issues with the scratch files.

-Scott
B
BBaker
Dec 21, 2003
I’m getting the same message when installing Photoshop 6.01 on Windows Xp pro. Please talk me through the setup.

thanks.
L
LenHewitt
Dec 22, 2003
B Baker,

Do you have more than one drive partition? If not then just ignore the message – it is advisory not an error.

If you DO have more than one partition, then form Photoshop
Edit>Preferences>Plugins and Scratch Disk set the scratch to another
partition

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