Martin: You should use one partition (the first one) for your scratch disk. The partition is large enough that you should not need to use any other partitions.
Re: "PS prefers not to have a scratch disk on the same drive as the original file." I have my client files on the same drive, but a different partition. Doesn’t make much difference, the scratch disk holds the information on changes to the file you are working on, when you save it is written to the original file location, you are doing one or the other, but not both.
I think that PS prefers to have the scratch file on another HD to the Photoshop program if possible, rather than a separate partition on the same HD. Could be wrong but it works for me.
Roger
Well, "prefer" is the questionable word. Photoshop will alert the user if the Windows swap file and the scratch disk are on the same logical drive letter.
One way around that is to create a partition and thus another logical drive letter. There is no benefit, from a performance perspective.
On the other hand, adding a second physical drive (and thus a logical drive letter), adds some theoretical (but not practical) benefit in the most extreme of circumstances.
In both cases the message goes away, but in neither case is there any practical benefit to the user, except again, in the most extreme of circumstances.
I do as roger – the scratch disk is on a separate physical drive, but that’s more for available space considerations than anything.
Peace,
Tony
Much appreciated, thanks
Martin
I have two 160Gb SATA hard drives on my PC, but I’m unsure just how to set up for Photoshop. I hope someone can help. I have 2Gb of RAM. I plan to partition my hard drives into three partitions each. On hard drive "1", I plan to put on the first outside partition the virtual memory for Windows (3GB) and nothing else. Next on drive "1", I will put Windows XP Pro and other operational programs such as Word (about 10Gb). Last on drive "1", I’ll use the remaining approx. 147Gb for data storage. On hard drive "2", I’ll put Photoshop scratch disk on the first outside partition (5Gb). On the next partition, I’ll put Photoshop CS, Photoshop plug ins and other photo related programs (about 10Gb). The last partition of about 145 Gb will be used for data storage. Is this plan the best use of my hard drives to optimize for Photoshop? Would additional hard drives allow me to do another set up that would provide a big increase in speed for Photoshop?
This has worked for for me Dean, my main priority being PSCS, and set up like this Photoshop very seldom drops below 100% efficiency.
On Disk 1 Windows WP in ‘C’ – Programs in ‘E’ – Photoshop scratch in its own partition ‘S’. On disk 2 Programs (including PS) in ‘D’ – XP page file in a small partition of its own – various other partitions for data, pictures, etc.
Roger
