Yet Again… Location of Scratch Disk

BJ
Posted By
bob jared
Aug 27, 2003
Views
403
Replies
4
Status
Closed
I have 2 hard drives, each w/ multiple partitions. On the first hard drive is the WinXP OS and in another partition on the first hard drive is where Photoshop is installed.

On the second hard drive in it’s own partition is where the WinXP swapfile is located. I have enough room on the second drive to create a dedicated partition for PS’s Scratch Disk, which obviously puts it on a seperate hard drive from PS but on the same hard drive as the Win swap file. Would this be helpful or self defeating ?

In other words, given a choice it can be located on the same drive as PS or the same drive as the Win swap file.

Thanks so much for any advice and hints.

Bob

MacBook Pro 16” Mockups 🔥

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Y
YrbkMgr
Aug 27, 2003
Photo Help is right (as usual <grin>), but the one comment I would add is if you can put the scratch disk on a separate PHYSICAL drive (not a prartition), the theory is you’ll get better performance.

There’s no use to putting it on a separate partition of the same hard drive is the point.

But as Photo Help says, you won’t notice any difference except in the most extreme of circumstances.

Peace,
Tony
B
BLUDVLZ
Aug 27, 2003
Just to add to the comments, I have heard that, when specifying scratch drives, it’s best not to locate your primary scratch to the same drive/parition that contains your Windows swap file…
PH
Photo Help
Aug 27, 2003
Thanks for the vote of confidence Tony but there are so many things to consider…

Like so many other things. Is it better to have a 2.6 GHz system than a 2.4 GHz system, of course but will any of us notice a difference worth spending an extra $50? Probably not.

Issues that come into play are…

Fragmentation

Speed\Bandwidth

Swap File and simultaneous Scratch disk access – Unlikely.

Memory – If you are writing to disk that much get more!!!

Wear & Tear – Do you want the drive where you save your master files to be worn down by constant swap and scratch access.

We all know the limitations of bandwidth, memory, drive speed, etc. Raids are great for writing data, bad for reading data.

Scratch disk configurations that work well for one person, may result in higher costs with no noticeable benefits for others.

The key is to use the scratch disk as little as possible. Once you are writing to disk you are already slowing yourself down considerably so a one or two percent speed difference will mean very little.
R
r68139
Aug 29, 2003
If you have two hard drives, the scratch disk should be on one and the swap file should go on the other.

Photoshop uses the swap file when it runs out of memory, and the scratch disk for a number of house-keeping tasks. The bottom line is that Photoshop is going to use the scratch disk regardless of how much memory you have, and unless you have many Gigs of memory, Windows is going to use the swap file when you are working on big files. When both Windows and Photoshop want to go the hard disk at the same time, Windows always wins, making Photoshop wait its turn. This is only going to happen when the size of the picture you are working on (including all its layers) are about as large as the amount of memory you have on your computer, so a comparison test with small files doesn’t tell you anything.

To get the best performance, Microsoft recommends that Windows an the paging (swap) file go on different drives, and Adobe recommends that the swap file not be on the drive with Windows or the swap file, so the ultimate configuration would be three drives, one with windows, one with the paging file, and the other with the swap file. This configuration is noticeably faster on my machine when printing a large picture (the temporary file for the picture goes on the drive with Windows) and working on another picture in Photoshop at the same time.

Bottom line? None of this matters much unless you work on big files. What is big? A full resolution scan from my 4000 ppi scanner is about 60 MB, and by the time I am finished it could be as high as 350 MB. With this size file, where you put you swap disk and Page file makes a noticeable difference.

Hope this helps,

Mike

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003 05:46:45 -0700, "bob jared" wrote:

I have 2 hard drives, each w/ multiple partitions. On the first hard drive is the WinXP OS and in another partition on the first hard drive is where Photoshop is installed.

On the second hard drive in it’s own partition is where the WinXP swapfile is located. I have enough room on the second drive to create a dedicated partition for PS’s Scratch Disk, which obviously puts it on a seperate hard drive from PS but on the same hard drive as the Win swap file. Would this be helpful or self defeating ?

In other words, given a choice it can be located on the same drive as PS or the same drive as the Win swap file.

Thanks so much for any advice and hints.

Bob

MacBook Pro 16” Mockups 🔥

– in 4 materials (clay versions included)

– 12 scenes

– 48 MacBook Pro 16″ mockups

– 6000 x 4500 px

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