Confused on utilizing scratch disk – please help!

E
Posted By
earlyman53
Aug 22, 2006
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217
Replies
2
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Closed
Hi all

this is my 1st post (although i’ve been using photoshop for close to 10 years). i am having an issue with scratch disk(s)-

have a p4 with 1.5gb ram, win xp home; photoshop is on my c: drive. i have recently purchased a 74gb 10,000 rpm serial drive and dedicated it as a swap file (to hopefully speed things up). i have 75% resources allocated to photoshop. i have designated the serial drive as the primary (only) scratch disk. i usually have no other programs running while using photoshop.

when working with a multilayered file (+ – 500mb) the led for the c: drive (on which photoshop is loaded) flashes continuosly (?) when merging layers, saving, etc., though the efficiency usually reads 100%. i have noticed no speed up in operations since installing the serial scratch disk (which i hoped/expected to see). I am very confused as to why there is so much activity on the c: drive – sometimes it takes 15 minutes to merge layers or save a 500mb file. what gives? any help you could give me would be really appreciated!
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AC
Art Campbell
Aug 22, 2006
In your PS preferences, did you eliminate any references to C:\ as the scratch drive?

When you do a directory listing of the new drive, does it show the scratch drive?

Where are your data files stored? If they’re on the C:\ drive… that’s a likely reason for the activity.

Art
C
chrisjbirchall
Aug 22, 2006
75% allocated to PS is too high. With only 1.5gb RAM you should leave it at the default 55% or even less.

Certain functions are carried out outside of Photoshop’s memory allocation. Saving and opening of files is one of them.

If the OS is having to page out to virtual memory, that could account for the Drive C activity and the slow performance.

If possible don’t have your data files on the same drive as the scratch disk, otherwise there will be read/write conflicts as a large file is read from scratch and simultaneously written to disk.

Make sure too, that you have at least 20% free (defragmented) space on drive C to accommodate the volatile nature of temporary files.

A good place to read about PS memory handling is : <http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html>

Hope this helps

Chris.

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