Multiple Scratch Drive Configuration Options – Possible Feature Request

SB
Posted By
Steve_Bland
Jan 2, 2007
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804
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Before I take this to feature request (CS3 or CS4), I thought I would run it by you guys here. Perhaps there is some registry tweak available that you know about that will give me what I want.

How can I get phototshop Scratch subsystem to take advantage of more than one scratch drive for PERFORMANCE improvement? With the Scratch Preference panel, I know I can have 4 scratch drives specified, but the way photoshop uses that lineup is when the first drive gets full, it moves to the second, third, then fourth which improves scratch capacity not scratch performance.

When there are two drives available, why not take advantage of the performance improvement potential? Using windows Perfmon utility to monitor the activity of the scratch drives, you will see photoshop at times reading and writing to the same scratch drive which is inefficient because the head has to move back and forth between the read location and the write location.

I believe performance can be greatly improved by reading from one drive while writing to the other drive. The scratch data would be managed in such a way that it would flow back and forth between the two drives rather than two seperate locations on the same drive.

So, the question I am asking you all is: Is this possible today?

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In case your wondering what my setup is that I would be wanting this: I have Dual U320 SCSI channels. Both ChA & ChB have RAID-0 arrays. THE GOOD NEWS IS Photoshop Scratch Manager will have as much as 210MBytes/sec sustained data rate being read or 190MB/s written through ChA.

THE BAD NEWS IS ChB is capable of the same and is not being utilised and when the Scratch drive is getting reads/writes at the same time, the performance drops down to like 25% throughput despite <2ms avg seek time. The drive is completely clean and dedicated to scratch.

Steven Bland

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