10,000 rpm drive for PS

At a recent Photoshop meeting it was suggested that I purchase a 20-40 gig SATA HD at 10,000 RPM dedicated to a Photoshop scratch disk. This should speed up file manipulation with PS/CS. Has anypone heard of this?

Hi Sanford,

It sounds as though someone was basically just suggesting that you get the fastest, reasonably affordable drive you could and use that as a scratch disk. Given that PS benefits from the use of a secondary drive as a scratch disk, then theoretically the fastest drive you could provide for that purpose should improve performance. How noticeable a difference a cheaper 7200rpm vs. more expensive 10,000 rpm drive would make I have no idea, but tend to think the difference wouldn't be all that obvious when you average in all the other factors that affect Photoshop's performance, not to mention just routine distractions. If you are working with particularly large files (I'm guessing on the order of hundreds of megs) then maybe the fastest drive really does begin to show some value...others who more routinely deal with such files can probably provide an experienced opinion on that.

Note too that you'd not likely use that full 20-40GB of space as a scratch disk, but rather the first 4GB or so. I'm not sure what is the max amount of disk space that PS can utilize as a scratch disk...again someone else can likely answer that question.

Regards,

Daryl

Having a faster separate drive dedicated to being your scratch disc will speed up your Photoshop operations, but how much depends on a lot of other factors, including how much ram you have, how big your files are and if they exceed the amount of ram you are using. The biggest improvement is usually seen when you stripe mulitple drives together in a RAID Level 0 array resulting in a scratch disc volume that can be two or more times faster than a single drive unit. Where you'll really see a measurable difference is in working with huge files that can't hope to be fully contained in ram. But that doesn't mean those operations will be fast, just faster.

This is an over rated theory, based on slow hard drives of yester-year. It may help to have a separate drive, or even a partition, to deal with disk fragmentation. But again, probably not worth the trouble.

Make sure you have enough memory (RAM). 1GB would be good. Defrag your hard drives on a weekly basis. Avoid pre-loading useless apps in your StartUp folder.

Bill Crocker

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At a recent Photoshop meeting it was suggested that I purchase a 20-40 gig

SATA HD at 10,000 RPM dedicated to a Photoshop scratch disk. This should speed up file manipulation with PS/CS. Has anypone heard of this?