is Scrath drive necessary with 64 bit cs4? with abundant ram

R
Posted By
rlmerriam
Sep 24, 2008
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374
Replies
9
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Closed
I intend to acquire ps cs4 andi have a 64 bit machine with 32gb of ram…problem is it would be difficult for me to set up a different scratch disc…how much ram would one need in order to see no benefit from a scratch disc ??

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F
Freeagent
Sep 24, 2008
My scratch partition is 40 GB, so with 32 GB RAM you’d think you could skip it altogether.

The problem with that is that PS writes the entire scratch file to disc in the background no matter what, at least CS3 does. Having lots of RAM just speeds it up because it’s cached.

You could try to look into RAMdisk, where a portion of RAM is set up as a virtual HD. I haven’t tried it and don’t have any details.
JJ
John Joslin
Sep 24, 2008
Scratch is not an overflow for lack of RAM any more. It is use by PS as soon as you open a file.

You need a scratch disk. If you can’t have a dedicated one, make a partition available.
M
Mylenium
Sep 24, 2008
As John said – scratch disks and swap files are inevitable. They are a fundamental part of how Photoshop works as well as your operating system, for that matter. There’s no way to bypass it. In your case you may just be lucky that the scratch file never exceeds 200 MB or so…

Mylenium
DW
Donald_W_Schwartz
Sep 24, 2008
I think that no matter how much RAM you have, there is a limit with CS3 of about 3GB that Photoshop can actually use.

Don
R
rlmerriam
Sep 24, 2008
that’s true with 32 bit cs3 and even 32bit cs4 but 64 bit cs4 should address far more.. it’s 2 to the 32nd power vs 2 64th power i think
F
Freeagent
Sep 24, 2008
Let’s see…2 to the power of 64…brrr…click…ting…OH MY GOD 8-o
R
rlmerriam
Sep 24, 2008
since i brought it up i just did the math…2 to 64th power is 1.84 times 10 to 19th power…i think that bears some relationship to how much ram the cpu can access but i’m not computer literate enuff to be sure anyway i’m a little off topic
as i understand it the reason that photoshop uses scratch drives is so the app doesn’t have to compete with the operating system for what os calls "virtual memory"…i would think if one had enuff ram that the os wouldn’t need virtual memory so ps would not be competing for hard drive access even if it did need to use it…i’m a little curious why ps doesn’t address the fact that computers are continuously equipped with more and more ram….if adobe bothers to develop a 64 bit application that can address scads of ram why does ps continue to use hard drives for scratch files-when memory is faster ?
JJ
John Joslin
Sep 24, 2008
The RAM on a 64bit system hits a stop with current motherboards long before the theoretical limit.
M
Mylenium
Sep 25, 2008
Indeed it does. The "fattest" workstation mobo I’m aware of will handle 96GB. Beyond that, for non-server OSs, the memory will get truncated at 128GB.

Mylenium

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