Scratch Disk & Photoshop

What would be the best way to set up the scratch disk when using photoshop? I have 2 additional 250 GB hard drives set up as Raid 0 in addition to the 250 GB system HD. Is it best to use the Raid as primary SD? Partition the Raid and use that partition as SD? Can you even partition a Raid HD?

There is a new and updated Photoshop Test utility to help benchmark the time for various steps. There is also a pdf guide Photoshop Acceleration Basics
I would RAID you whole three drives, and just backup A LOT. Like at least daily. And be sure that you can restore and boot from your backups.
Personally, I think 10K Raptors are great if you can afford to, for boot drive, for scratch, or both, but four 250GB drives might do well for most.

Similar Messages

Scratch disk photoshop CC

I am fairly new to PhotoShop, I have been using Adobe Lightroom for years though. I did download photoshop in the past but I've decided to do it again since I'm getting into multiple exposure stuff more.
Will a 256GB external portable SSD be a good scratch disk for my laptop for photoshop? It has nothing on it. Also, I read online scratch disk can get full. I was under the impression scratch disk erase whenever you're done with a project and it goes back to lightroom.
Since I save the edits in my lightroom catalog after photoshop is there really any reason to save any photoshop project? Unless of course I'm not done with it. If so, what is the importance of the scratch disk? Do I need to save scratch disk data and not delete it?
I'm fairly confused on what the scratch disk even does really. I kinda get it, but kinda don't. I get it will be faster. But I don't get why it wouldn't self delete if I'm saving the edits in lightroom for photoshop.

I don't know how many bits the stacks are. I use a Sony A7R full frame camera which is 36.4MP. I do not use the HDR function in photoshop because that never looks good. I put all 3 as layers and do it manually.
I have a lot of hard drives, but most not being portable. I have two portable ones. Which would be better; The SSD 256GB USB 3.0 or the Firewire 1TB portable drive.
I do have one other portable drive that is USB 3.0, 1TB and is actually 7200RPM even though it's a portable drive. It's as fast as the desktop drives. But that's the one I store my photo's on but if needed I can change the drives around.
If my Sony is using 32bit, is that going to be a problem? I have not yet done it with the Sony. The last time I had photoshop and was doing the manual HDR, I did it with the Canon 5D Mark iii with no scratch disk and it worked flawlessly. In both my macbook pro's I have 16GB of ram, a really good video card, and both have quad core i7 processors.
So, again, I do not want to uncheck my internal drive as a scratch disk drive correct? Just check them both? I've done speed test and the internal SSD is faster than the USB 3.0 SSD because it's internal and the other will only do 3.0 I won't do thunderbolt.
How big can can scratch drive get? Is there a limit on it?

Scratch disk error plus canvas image error help

so i recently restored my computer back to factory settings .. so my computer doesnt even have any new downloaded app .. i download photoshop cs6 now im getting scratch disk errors ..which i dont see possible if my computer doesnt have anything on it (besides what it came with) my hard drive has 276 gb i only used 33 .. so why am i having this problem?? i made an external hard drive and that has 8 gb ... also its moving very slow .. also its telling me i cant make an new canvas size 1920 x 1020 with an resloution of 300 which i know is possible because i done it before so if anybody can tell me what im doing wrong or how i can fix this problem please .. i need photoshop for work . and this is impossible .. im using windows 7 toshiba

Without going into much detail, the scratch can grow to humongous sizes. In general, figure on 50 to 100 times or more the size of your largest file multiplied by the number of files you have open.
My preference is not to work with less than 200 GB of contiguous, unfragmented available drive space for scratch on a physically separate, dedicated, internal hard drive as my primary scratch disk.
Also consider that if you rely on your boot drive for primary scratch disk, Photoshop's scratch is sharing that space with the swap files of the OS.
That's one of the issues, and it can be be made much worse if you have a faulty drive. A badly fragmented drive would also be a big problem.
As for that external drive with a pathetic 8 GB of remaining available space, you should back it up, store it in a safe place, a get a new one. Any time any one of your hard drives gets to be 80% full or more, you are already in a heap of problem. With that little space left, you should make sure it's not being used even as a secondary scratch disk.
Hard drive real estate is very cheap these days.

Photoshop Scratch Disk Error OSX 10.7.5

I had a Mac with CS5.5 installed. Suddenly i got an Error Message on Startup: "Could not open a scratch file because the disk is unavailable...."
Unable to solve the Problem I Updated to CS6.0 in hope of fixing the Problem that way. It did not.
So i deleted the User and created a new one which worked, for a while at least. Now i have the same Error again!
After searching around a bit i found this Thread: Re: Photoshop Scratch Disk Error OSX Lion 10.7.3
In this Thread FocusCreative22 found the answer to that Problem. He suggested checking "Ignore Ownership on this Volume" in the Volume Info.
My Problem now is that either through having a newer OS version or only having the Startupdrive i dont have the checkbox "Ignore Ownership on this Volume". How to fix this Problem then?

Chris,
Thank you for responding. I think you're onto something. I looked in disk utility to see if I could repair permissions on the scratch volume, as Lundberg suggested, however the option to do so was greyed out due to this message: "Not available because the selected disk is set to ignore ownership". So I went to the partition, pulled up the Get Info box and saw that the "Ignore Ownership on this Volume" box was not checked. I checked it to see what would happen, and although the option to repair permissions is still greyed out in disk utility, now Photoshop starts up perfectly, even with the problematic scratch partition set as the primary Photoshop Scratch Disk.
Is this the wrong way to get to the right answer?
Concerning your other suggestions, I was able to use Go To Folder to get to the /private folder, and I saw that it said I could only read. I was able to add my user account and give it Read/Write permission through the Get Info dialogue box (I fear Terminal unless I have explicit instructions). Is this what I want? I also looked into the /volumes folder and apparently there is nothing within it, unless the folders are hidden I suppose. I checked permissions of my main drive (startup disk, on which all my applications reside) and they claim that I have read/write privileges. However I'm only viewing this in the Get Info box; is that not the right place to see/alter it? Because this whole time the scratch partition also claimed that I have read/write permissions and that was obviously not true, as it only started working right once I checked "Ignore Ownership on this Volume". But it's incredibly confusing because I could save files to the scratch drive from Photoshop; I just couldn't choose it as a scratch drive.
The short question is: is it ok that I simply chose to ignore ownership on these disks, and that I messed with the /private folder, and/or do I need to do anything else?

Question about Photoshop scratch disk and specific setup

Hi Folks
Thanks for the help in advance.
I'm a novice and need help finding a solution to a new PC Build. (Windows 7 Pro 64bit with Photoshop CS6)
I only recently found out about having a scratch disk dedicated for photoshop (very novice i know ), and was wondering if a 120-128GB SSD would be enough? (Please bear in mind I can't fit large SSD raid configs to my budget, plus I live in New Zealand, so prices are higher for SSD at the moment).
I only edit single camera RAW files at a time around 25mb per file, with no large amount of layers and very rarely do large images i.e. Panorama etc. I have searched the forums but could not find a concrete answer.
My setup was originally meant for a HTPC (I don't intend to overclock), but I will also be using it for light photography projects. Specs below:
CPU: Intel i7 3770
Mobo: Asrock B75 Pro3-M (or Asus P8H77m Pro, depending on budget)
16gb Ram (maybe bump up to 32gb later)
120-128gb SSD for OS and apps
120-128gb SSD scratch disk
2 TB HDD for storage
If anyone knows, the motherboards I've listed have 3x Sata3 ports, Asrock has one Intel chip and two Asmedia controlled Sata3 ports, while Asus has 2x Intel controlled and 1x Marvell controlled Sata3 port. If I went with the Asrock, would it be okay to connect the OS/Apps SSD to the intel controlled sata3 port and have the scratch disk and storage HDD to the Asmedia sata3 ports?
And one more novice question, when I begin to edit my images, is it best to transfer my photos from memory card to storage HDD then work from there? Or would it be quicker opening images direct from a USB 3.0 card reader / USB 3.0 external hard drive?
Thanks again everyone, really appreciate it

priddye wrote:
Just to clarify, if/when I get one 256gb SSD for my main C: drive, I can load the OS/Apps and store some data for the time being (until I get another SSD) and use the 2TB HDD for scratch disk only?
Yes, that's what I meant. You could try putting Photoshop scratch on C: at least temporarily, and watch your free space carefully. If you don't work on big documents or set your history states to be very large, it might be workable. But be careful. The safe "set it and forget it" configuration is to make your HDD the one and only Photoshop scratch drive.
When I do get around to getting the second 256gb, I will look at installing the two SSD's in RAID configuration. If i were to do this, can I load the OS/Apps to the RAID SSD's as well as using them for scratch disks and have the 2TB HDD for storage? I hope that makes sense.
Sounds about right; with 512GB on tap you should be able to run just about everything from C:, as long as you don't keep your entire photo library on there. Realistically, on a big system that's got a lot of apps installed and has been used for some time, Windows and your apps may end up consuming 100 to 150 GB, so that would still leave you a lot of breathing room.
Keep in mind that what you describe may require 3rd party re-partitioning software and/or backup and restoral, or a complete reinstallation of Windows and everything (usually the latter is what is recommended when moving up to a RAID system volume).
By the way, SSDs stay in best working order if you overprovision - i.e., maintain a fair amount of free space. The internal controllers need the free space to keep the data organized well and maintain top performance.
-Noel

Save as Photoshop PDF Scratch disk locked?

I searched the forums, but apparently my issue only crops up when someone tries to launch PS. I can launch and do everything else just fine; however, I attempted to save as > PDF and received the scratch disk locked message. I can successfully save as PDF if I use the launch as admin option, but this seems odd since I can do everything else just fine without the need to do that.
Here are my steps:
Save as > Photoshop PDF
Click OK on "The settings you choose in the Save Adobe PDF dialog can override your current settings...."
I change [b]nothing[/b] in the Save Adobe PDF dialog. I simply click Save PDF.
Select Yes for "Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities" in the prompt.
Here is where I get the error message.
"Could not open a scratch file because the file is locked, you do not have necessary access permissions, or another program is using the file. Use the 'Properties' command in the Windows Explorer to unlock the file."
At this point, Photoshop does not crash or exit. It just simply will not save the file. This is the first time I've tried to save as PDF, so it could just be a user error > replace user situation. :d
I have tried the CTRL + Shift + Alt method of launching to wipe my preferences only to have the same result. My scratch disk is an internal drive used only as storage with 1.30 TB available.
Photoshop CS6 Extended
Windows 7 64bit
User account is an admin, but I have never had a need to launch PS as an admin specifically.
Thanks in advance.

Checked my permissions on C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Settings and everything is fine.
Taking that info and some google work I came across this: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WS23B45D06-1977-4006-8BEB-2DBB08CA502Ea.htm l#WSA79FA899-BC95-401e-BD44-5B26BC31B369
Apparently, there should be PDF settings files in C:\Users\***\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe PDF\Settings; however, my folder was empty, but the article above also says to move them from an 'Extras' folder located within ProgramData. Copied the settings over, tried again, same result.
Am I supposed to have Acrobat installed for this to work properly? I don't have Acrobat, nor do I even use Reader (I use a different program for in-browser PDF).
//edit
Apparently it was in my settings on the PDF save dialog. I removed the settings that I moved over and tried again. This time I actually fiddled with the settings and used Smallest File Size instead of HQ Print, and that seemed to have worked. Messed with things some more, and narrowed it down to the Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities option. As long as that option is UN-checked, then everything works smoothly, including HQ quality.

Error when launching Photoshop - cannot modify scratch disk preferences

Hi all,
I recently installed photoshop CS5. When launching it I get the following error:
'Could not open a scratch file because the disk is not available'.
I went on this forum and found out several threads relevant to that issue. I did the following to try to fix the problem:
Did a clean uninstall of CS5, made sure no file pertaining to CS5 were remaining
Reinstalled CS5
As the problem was still occuring I did the following (as hinted in the threads)
I reset the photoshop preferences according to http://forums.adobe.com/thread/370735?tstart=0
I modified the setting of the drive HD (read & write everywhere, share folder checked)
I then tried to change the scratch disk preferences (launch photoshop then click Option+Command+Shift)I can select my disk but the selection does next time I try it is still the same (c.f. screen shot): first = startup, second = none, etc.)
I would really appreciate if someone could help me on this one.
Thank in advance,
Francis

I have one drive, but the point is rather that when I select it (=macintosh HD), it is still Startup that appears in the menu as depicted above on the next launch.

Photoshop CS2 scratch disk error

Those of you who have Photoshop CS2 (9.01) installed and have a 2nd internal SATA drive, can you sucessfully set the scatch disk to the 2nd drive (or just a non-startup internal HDD?). This is NOT a RAID configuration.
When I set the scratch disk to the 2nd drive and restart PS, it gives an error on launch that PS can't initialize the disk because it doesn't exist. Well golly, it's right on the destkop, passes the Apple hardware test and disk utility tests and works fine for my 30 gigs of iTunes and all that good stuff. It's been formatted with Apple's disk utility and has one standard Mac OS Extended journaled partition.
My boot drive is partitioned with Bootcamp and has an NTFS partition. Of course I am not selecting that partition with PS but just wondering if that's an additional monkey wrench.

Somewhere in the foggy last couple months, I know that I have read that before.
either the ignore ownership flag needs to be off, you also want to disable spotlight for that drive, though that isn't the reason...
something really simple but not obvious.

Could not use the type tool because the scratch disks are full in Photoshop CS5.1?

How do of get rid of the scratch disk error in photoshop? I'm using Photoshop CS5.1 extended and this error message apperars each time I try to do anything in Photoshop that message comes up. Anyone have any suggestions on how I can remove this error?

What operating system are you using?
Is your hard drive running low on free space?
How much free space is left on your hard drive?
Is your scratch disk for photoshop set to the Startup drive or some other drive?
(photoshop (edit)>preferences>preformance)

Photoshop CS5 does not want to open after I changed the scratch disks in prefs

I was working on a large document in Photoshop CS5 that ate too much of my main drive (to the point I had to quite and restart a few times to clear it out) when the main drive was set as a scratch disk. I went in to preferences and changed the scratch disk to my secondary internal drive, where I keep all my media. Then quit Photoshop to clear the cache.
When I tried to open Photoshop again I get a message at start up (haven't gotten in to the program yet) saying: "Could not open a scratch file because the disk is not available". Clicked OK. Then another warning message: "Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is not available."
Both disks are mounted and available. Since Photoshop never actually opens up I cannot go in and reset the scratch disk to my intinital settings.
Anybody got an idea what I can do to solve this?
Thanks,
/Fred

Worst case: trashing prefs by keeping ctrl-alt-shift pressed while starting Photoshop (and then using the dialog) should allow you to open it.

Photoshop 7 will not recognize my fire wire drives as scratch disks

Photoshop 7 will not recognize my fire wire drives as scratch disks.
Using Photosop 7.0.1 & Mac OS X Tiger on G4 Tower with AGP Graphics.
Any Ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Tom

The drives need to be formatted as Macintosh HFS+ Extended (not Windows or FAT32, for instance), and you must have full read/write permissions to them.
Otherwise, Photoshop will not let you select them as scratch disk drives. Of course, formatting will completely erase the entire drive, so if you have anything on them you need to keep, you'll need to back it up first.
If necessary, do a Get Info (Command I) on the icon of the drive in the Finder and check "Ignore Ownership on this drive"; but first the drive needs to be formatted as Macintosh Extended.

Can I use my old g5 tower as a scratch disk for my Macbook Pro for Photoshop?

I just made the laptop jump away from towers and am a little shocked by how much difference a smaller scratch disk makes. Can I use my old tower as a scratch disk to help out my new Macbook Pro?
Any other tweaks I can do to speed up large files in Photoshop? Should I bump up the ram usage by Photoshop above the recommened percentage?

Hm. It sounds like you know what you are talking about, and apparently I don't. I was just going to plug in a firewire cable to both and hoped that magically scratch disk would appear as an option for my tower.
Cant I somehow boot the tower as using as a hardrive only? Or applesharing or something else?

Adobe Photoshop Scratch Disk Full/Startup Disk Full error - PLEASE HELP

Dear ALL,
I have started to notice recently that when I run Photoshop CS on my Mac OSX Tiger, I am getting the Startup Disk Full error message. Never happended before.
Since my initial post I downloaded Macaroni (utility) and have run the daily/weekly/monthly backups, checked the /private/var/vm and /private/var/log and /Volumes. Nothing unusual there...
When I started getting this error I had 32GB left on a looked at my HD and I seem to have 32GB available on a 152GB drive. Now after deleting I have 76GB capacity left.
But when I tried to open a Photoshop PSD or TIFF file and do a crop I still get tge Startup Disk is Full error followed by the Adobe Photoshop error Scratch Disk is Full.
I am thinking of running the Disk Utility from the Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility and doing a Verify Disk and Verify Disk Permissions followed by Repair Disk Permissions. I will be logged into the machine whilst doing this. Is there any danger in this as I have read elsewhere that I need to do this from a bootable volume. If that is the case how do I create a bootable disk/cd? If not then what is the cure to my Disk Full as surely there is now nearly 50% FREE!!!!!
Please help.
Max

PS will always use the boot disk for scratch to some extent even with an alternate primary scratch disk.
Be sure to turn off Spotlight as it causes problems.
4GB of RAM would be nice, I understand small files don't work well if there is more than 4GB RAM but large files will. OS X uses free RAM as cache and RAM disk before using disk drives.
How much RAM is allocated to PS? More RAM would help.
A dedicated lean boot drive helps. Install just what is needed for your work, use a separate drive for data, and yet another RAID volume for scratch.
When in doubt, backup with SuperDuper, and do an erase and then restore. Always backup before repairing; and never, ever, use an old version of Tiger CD/DVD - like 10.4.2 on 10.4.7/.8. Use "fsck" instead, or your emergency boot drive.
Also, give Applejack a shot and delete the cache folders and swap files from time to time to keep a system humming. CS/CS2 and Tiger benefit nicely from more RAM.

Lacie Firewire external HD as Photoshop scratch disk

Hi, I bought a 250Gb Lacie External HD to backup my iBook stuff, and was planning on using it as Photoshop CS2 scratch disk.
The problem is that on menu Photoshop>Preferences>Plugins&Scratch Disks there's no option to choose the Lacie HD, only Startup and Macintosh HD, that are the same HD by the way...
I can actually open, save and do whatever I want on the Lacie HD, the only problem is that Photoshop doesn't think it deserves to be a scratch disk.
Any advice?

Hi, Stephen. I suspect that what Apple System Profiler is seeing (and telling you about) is the FireWire bridge chipset in the enternal enclosure, which obviously must be capable of FW800 since it has a FW800 port. ASP isn't telling you how the drive is actually connected, but what sort of bridge chipset it's detecting. The chipsets are different for FW 400 and FW800, but I imagine the FW800 chipset is backward-compatible, and so there's no FW400 chipset for ASP to detect and report.
Since the chipset is there and recognized by ASP, I presume that the problem you're having may be related to the drive mechanism itself. Not being familiar with the drive in question, I don't know what the blue light you speak of is supposed to signify. Can you hear the drive spin up when you turn it on? Does Disk Utility see it? And if so, does its Repair Disk routine report any unfixable problems, or can't you run it at all?

Photoshop Scratch Disk Error OSX Lion 10.7.3

I have had Photoshop CS5 installed on my system for over a year, and it worked fine all this time under Snow Leopard. Now that I've upgraded to Lion, Photoshop will not open due to these messages:
Could not open a scratch file because the disk is unavailable.
Could not initialize Photoshop because the disk is unavailable.
The scratch disk in question is an 80gb partition of a 1tb internal hard drive. If I delete the preferences file (by holding down cmd-shift-opt when starting PS) then it starts up just fine. If I go into preferences and reset it to use the scratch disk, then next time I try to reopen the program I get the same 2 error messages and I have to ditch the preferences again.
There is nothing wrong with the disks, I verified them. And anyway, I've been using that scratch disk with Photoshop for the last year with no issues. It was only after I switched to Lion that this started happening.
I need to be able to take advantage of the performance increase that a scratch disk offers. Anybody have any ideas on what's happening or how to solve this?

Chris,
Thank you for responding. I think you're onto something. I looked in disk utility to see if I could repair permissions on the scratch volume, as Lundberg suggested, however the option to do so was greyed out due to this message: "Not available because the selected disk is set to ignore ownership". So I went to the partition, pulled up the Get Info box and saw that the "Ignore Ownership on this Volume" box was not checked. I checked it to see what would happen, and although the option to repair permissions is still greyed out in disk utility, now Photoshop starts up perfectly, even with the problematic scratch partition set as the primary Photoshop Scratch Disk.
Is this the wrong way to get to the right answer?
Concerning your other suggestions, I was able to use Go To Folder to get to the /private folder, and I saw that it said I could only read. I was able to add my user account and give it Read/Write permission through the Get Info dialogue box (I fear Terminal unless I have explicit instructions). Is this what I want? I also looked into the /volumes folder and apparently there is nothing within it, unless the folders are hidden I suppose. I checked permissions of my main drive (startup disk, on which all my applications reside) and they claim that I have read/write privileges. However I'm only viewing this in the Get Info box; is that not the right place to see/alter it? Because this whole time the scratch partition also claimed that I have read/write permissions and that was obviously not true, as it only started working right once I checked "Ignore Ownership on this Volume". But it's incredibly confusing because I could save files to the scratch drive from Photoshop; I just couldn't choose it as a scratch drive.
The short question is: is it ok that I simply chose to ignore ownership on these disks, and that I messed with the /private folder, and/or do I need to do anything else?

Scratch Disk & Photoshop

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for