In article <5d90d$43e7b0ab$40971e23$
says…
I will load a DVD with perhaps 500 MB of photos and edit them and in about 5 minutes Photoshop CS starts floundering and slows to a halt. I have 126 Gigs of free hard drive and 1.50 GB of RAM. I have been told this condition has something to do with scratch file volume. Perhaps set the amount of hard drive to assign to the scratch file? Can you advise me on this please? I really need to correct it if possible. I appreciate this newsgroup. Dick Ross
Ross,
As others have mentioned, a second PHYSICAL HDD is a big step with PS Scratch Disk. The only advantage of partitioning a physical HDD for use with PS SD, is that it is easier to defragment, and to remove any TMP files, if you do crash. Otherwise, a second, third, fourth physical HDD will improve things. RAID 0 is also a bit of a "speed-up," but I’m not sure that the benchmarks would indicate THAT much of an increase. In CS/CS2, you can use all the HDD space, in 4 physical HDD configurations, that you can possibly buy.
As Al Dykes mentioned, some of the problem could be with reading directly from DVD. Also, if one Opens a ton of high-rez images at one time, it doesn’t take PS long to use up ALL of the real estate that you can possibly have, HDD SD space, RAM — Everything!
In response to Al’s suggestion, I’d agree, that copying the files to your image HDD, THEN working on them a few at a time, might be all that is required. However, as HDD’s are cheap, I’d also add all that you can.
My new workstation has 8 250 GB HDD’s in RAID 0 to give me 4x500GB SD space. My OS is on another RAID 0 HDD, and my image files are on another RAID 0 HDD. A lot of HDD’s, but nearly all gets used, at some time, or another with 10GB+ files (tons of Layers and very large size + high-rez). Is this overkill for you? Probably, but you can get an idea of what some of us do with regards to SD for PS.
Hunt