Scratch Disk & HD organization?

I’d wait until vista became public then buy a new computer 🙂

My own opinion is:
– Programs and OS on platter 1
– data on platter 2
– PS scratch on platter 3 (hard disks are so inexpensive these days)

It is also better, in my opinion, for the disks to be matched rather than some mongrel selection but depending upon the OS (OEM or retail?) you may be limited in that respect.

I don’t think that the logical partition on platter 1 into C: and D: is contributing to efficiencies but -hey- that’s just me 🙂

ps – 4 platters seem better than 3

IMO – I never partition drives because of the this puts high demand on the drive since you are using it as 2 or 3 drives. This then leads to quicker failure, and makes your system slower.

As for speed – more drives are better, if you can afford them and your computer has the capacity.

Here’s my layout – "C" Programs only 80 GB. "D" Data drive – (image files)300 GB. "S" Scratch 40 GB. "T" Transfer drive 250 GB. This drive is my work horse and is used for importing all my RAW files. Then I process and place TIFF, Large and small JPG’s into different folders so I have a breakdown to move them to backup drives, website upload, printing services, etc. I also have 400 GB hot swap SATA data backup drives on this same computer and on a file server as a second backup. I also use all WD drives. I only had one fail (so far) over the past 4 years.

I hope that helps!

Jan

I’d go for Seagates – they seem heck of a lot quieter.

Remember that any partitioned drive still uses the same heads for reading and writing. If something needs reading or writing in two separate partitions, it is still just one set of heads that has to move to both places.

HD partitions aren’t much more than fancy folder/directories for organization. They do allow you to format a whole chunk of your space without bothering any others. This is useful when you are running more than one operating system on a computer. Most OSs like to think they are the only one in existence and require their own partition.

I suppose that a disk defragmenter would work a tad faster if it worked on smaller chunks at a time. My experience shows me that it doesn’t really matter.

I’ve been partitioning HDs for a couple of decades. Mostly that had to do with testing environments. I also thought I should be getting performance gains, because lots of people said so. I finally did some of my own testing and found no speed improvement due to partitioning. Since it was always more of a pain to do, I quit doing it.

I now have XP, apps, and data on one bigger drive. It’s a 7200 rpm Seagate that works well. It’s nothing particularly fancy, but does the job. It is SATA I, but that speed seems more theoretical than real too.

I have a WD Raptor 36 GB too. I use it just for XP’s pagefile and Photoshop CS2’s scratch disk. Nothing else! Yeah, it doesn’t all get used, but that is the smallest size they make.

I found that opening and saving Photoshop files doesn’t make much difference on which speed HD I use. That may be just my way of working too. I DID find that when I fill up my 2 GB of memory things get WAY slower. Dedicating the fast drive to just Windows and CS2 virtual memory really did speed up the operation of Windows, Photoshop, and everything else. It is certainly worth it.

I use no partitions at all. (OK, I use 1 partition per physical device.) This works well, fast enough, and it allows for easier backing up. I can backup all my data with just one step.

If you want faster, then it’s time to start looking at RAID 0. I’ve wondered what a dedicated RAID 0 of Raptor drives would do for Photoshop’s (and XP’s) scratch disk. That seems a tad over the top, but I’m sure someone would find that useful. Of course, RAID 0 for your data drives would speed up that opening and saving.

I’ve always been a bit leary of RAID 0 though. Hey, if either drive dies on you, you’ve lost it all. I suppose that good backups would always handle that, but how many people have good backups? Of course, it wouldn’t matter on a drive only for pagefile and scratch. RAID 5 always seemed to be much safer with most of the speed gains for data drives. However, you now need 3 drives instead of 2.

Thanks,
Clyde

wrote:

I’m a little confused on how to organize my HD’s and assigning the correct place for the scratch disk and photos.

Right now, I have 2 HD’s. One is the slower and the older one with 2 partitions C & D. Win XP and PS CS2 is located in C. D is used for data and JPEGs. Second HD is the faster Raptor HD and has a smaller partition for Scratch Disk and the larger partition for PSD/TIFF photos.

Do you think this is OK for optimum PS performance? Is it a good idea to have the scratch disk and large size photos on same HD but in different partitions?

How would you organize if you had these HD’s?

Thanks in advance.