Best External Scratch Disk ?

I have a MacBook Pro with a 250GB drive and I wanted to get a portable external hard drive to store all my videos on and use as scratch disk. My question is, does anyone have any suggestions on which external drive would work best? I was looking at a 320GB Iomega eGo with firewire interface. My only concern is the data transfer rate, I don't want there to be any problems when I'm editing off an external drive.

Depends on the type of footage you work with. If it's just DV, any drive with FireWire 400 will work just fine (though you'll of course want to read reviews to determine one with good reliability. NewEgg.com is a good place to start). If you're getting into HD, you'll want FW800 at least. You may also want to use this handy tool:
http://www.digital-heaven.co.uk/videospace/
to calculate how big a drive you want based on how large your projects tend to run.
If you're looking for my personal recommendation, I've used the OWC Mercury Elite Pro for a while now and it's served me well.

Similar Messages

Best External Scratch Disk for iMac?

I'm a new Mac user and i'm now using my iMac as my primary computer. I've been looking online to find out which approach is best when using adobe products that require scratch disks. Should i use external USB or Firewire interface? What I've done for my windows system in the past is I purchased a 10,000rpm hard drive and dedicated it as a scratch disk and installed it internally. If I do this with either USB or firewire, my big plan is I would go and get a 10krpm hard drive and by an enclosure with usb and firewire. Anyone know how I should approach this on an iMac and will my plan work?
Thanks!

You could go with an external Firewire 800 disk and a 7200 or faster drive. But that won’t be as fast as your iMac’s internal drive which is SATA II 3Gbps. You could partition the internal drive so that you have one ‘work’ drive to be used for video/graphics scratch files. At least I did that. Bit of work ahead of you though since your internal drive currently is likely just one big partition. Post back your conclusions.

Fastest and best external hard disks for video use with Imac?

What is the fastest and best external hard disks for video use with Imac (I believe it is currently not possible to use Esata on the Imac).

For DVCam. HDV etc, I'm a fan of the G-raid drives. From personal experience they
are very solid performers. I only had one issue with a new drive that was replaced
next day. They are not the cheapest drives to be found but the build quality
is excellent. Check out:
http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-raid.cfm

HDV editing from an external scratch disk?

I use FCE to edit High Def video from my HCR HC1 and at the moment have my scratch disk on my internal hard drive. In the past i stupidly put it on my USB 2.0 external hard drive but quickly found i had problems with dropped frames etc. during playback. Can anyone give me feedback on using an external fire wire hard drive for a scratch disk (with HDV) and playback results/any problems encountered?
Thanks.

Hi Ross, I don't currently use an external scratch disk, only my internal 500Gb disk, but my experience may still have some relevance. My external 250Gb USB is used purely for copying files around via Finder.
I use two HCR-HC3 camcorders to do multi-cam edits. I have found that I get an occasional dropped frame during playback, especially if I am scubbing the timeline too agressively, or have another app in the background.
Good luck with the comments from other folk.

Photoshop external scratch disk to improve performances?

Hi
I have performances issues with Photoshop CS2 (and with LightRoom) on a 2.16GHz Intel iMac (45GB free disk space). This is perhaps due in part to the Rosetta engine. Small files are OK to work with, but when it comes to several hundred MB files, everything slows down. There are already 3 GB of Ram installed. I wonder if using an external (FW-800?) scratch disk could improve the performances? (What about a fast USB stick? Silly?) Or would I see a big change if I upgraded to an Intel written version of Photoshop? Thanks!
Paul

George,
I do not believe that having a second partition will reserve any particular area of the drive so partitioning the drive may not buy you much
Years ago there was this utility: FWB Harddisk Toolkit, which could set a scratch volume on the faster tracks of the drive. This was more needed at the time due to small size drives (9 Gb was huge!) and lower input/output. Nowadays, the processors, drives, memory and busses are blazing fast, but the resources needed to operate the OS and programs are way bigger too, and so are the digital camera files... One day shoot can easily reach 16 Gb of RAW files.
The idea is to keep your files stored on the external like you are doing but have the immediate files you are working on saved and opened from your desktop. Once you are finished working on it, copy it to the external then delete from desktop. If this is not going to work well for you the next best thing would be to get a FireWire 800 drive. The read/write speeds will be double that of the USB external.
Years ago I would spend $800 or more for a 500 Gb FW-800 drive for there was no other choice, but now when you need another 1Tb drive every 6 months or so, the FW-800 are still relatively expensive and the USB-2 very cheap! ... And so is the iMac in comparison to a MacPro! I suppose that I get what I pay for.
Thanks!
Paul

PE6 +External scratch disk

Good evening,
just added (via PE6 Editor -> Performance ->F:\) an external USB scratch disk and now PE6 Editor refuses to open, error displayed:
Could not initialize Photoshop Elements because the file is locked. Use the 'Properties' command in the Windows Explorer to unlock the file.
1. There is no such command in Windows Explorer (WIN 7 Ultimate 64 Bits)
2. If I eject the USB drive then the Editor opens properly ??? but I cannot remove the scratch drive from the settings because it is not visible anymore. (viscous circle).
any hints or workarounds ??? Is it there a settings file somewhere that can be deleted or manually modified so the Editor does not try to open the external scratch drive ???
Workstation: 4GB RAM, internal 250GB HDD (2 partitions, OS:50GB, DATA:185GB usable/89.3GB free where the data and scratch disk are located)
Kind regards,
Luis
Message was edited by: scaigs

Hi John,
Ok thanks but this doesn't resolve the fact that I cannot use an external USB drive as a scratch drive.
Tried the Ctrl-Alt-shift thingy and well it never asked me to reset
Any hints anyone.

External Scratch Disk?

I notice in CS4, that in the Performance Preference, Photoshop is giving me an option to use my 2 external drives as scratch disks. Is it now okay to do this? If not, what happens if you do?
Thanks!

Of course Photoshop allows a scratch disk on a non journaled drive. That is what we used before we had the option of journaled drives in Panther.
I thought all this was covered in the Adobe Knowledgebase regarding optimizing Photoshop performance but a second look indicates it is not. Adobe does not appear to make any distinction regarding journaled and non-journaled drives for scratch drive use.
In addition to journaled volumes, scratch drive performance can be affected by Time Machine, anti virus/malware scanners, background defragmenting (ie: Hot-File-Adaptive-Clustering), content indexing and any other odd process that runs in the background reading/writing to your drive.
Even when you disable all this fluff on your scratch drive partition, another journaled partition may still be stealing the attention of the drive heads. So I like to keep a dedicated, non-partitioned drive for scratch.

Requirements for an external scratch disk

Hi guys
I am looking into buying an external hard drive to use as a scratch disk for editing. I was wondering what the requirements are for it to work as a scratch disk.
Thanks

Sorry Luke to correct, but Firewire is the way to go. USB2 does not guarantee sustained data transfer as video requires. Even though some posters claim they had no problem with USB2.
Even though slightly more expensive I'd always buy firewire for video.
Piero

External Scratch disk disappears when DV camera plugged in.

Tried searching for this but there are so many things it could be I couldn't find anything that helped....
Hello Everyone,
My Dad's new imac seems to be having trouble accepting his firewire DV camera.
He has an external Lacie hard drive connected to the iMac via FW800. This is his scratch disk for Final Cut Pro.
When he just plugged his DV camera in to the FW400 port of the iMac, the Lacie drive (it's partitioned in to 3) disappeared.
When he unplugged the camera, it re-appeared. We tried plugging the camera in to the spare FW400 port on the back of his external, but this made Final Cut think that the drive was set to "read only" which, doesn't allow Final Cut to operate.
The External drive is partitioned correctly. He's used it fine since he got it.
I am suspecting that it has something to do with the DV camera or the Firewire 400 (6 circuit to 4 circuit) cable. I'm actually away from him at the moment and he doesn't have a second cable to try out but his next door neighbor may do so he's going over to ask tomorrow.
The Camera works fine. The iMac is only a couple of weeks old, if that. It was a reconditioned model so I also suspect there may be an issue with the FW400 port on the mac.
Is there a way to check the integrity of the firewire ports?
Has anyone experienced this problem?
We are trying to eliminate things as we think of them so I will post back any results. Thanks for your time.
Double_ohh7

Studio X,
From your comment on Cartoonguys post I should mention that my Dad's DV camera is a Canon too.
We narrowed things down a bit and it backs up what you've said. With Final Cut closed down, and the DV camera off, the external drive is ok. Turning the DV camera on does not affect anything. Opening FCP does not affect anything. Upon opening the capture window however, the external drive gets ejected and we get finders "Device Removal" warning.
Based on what you told me I searched around a bit and found plenty of comments from people experiencing problems on a single bus. A lot of them seemed to be the DV camera not working alongside FW800.
The next thing we will do is;
1) reset the scratch disk to the Primary Drive and try to capture from the Canon DV camera.
2) try plugging the external drive in to the FW400 port of the mac and then daisy chaining the DV camera through the FW400 port of the external.
3) if that doesn't birth any success then I will try reformatting the drive as a single partition and try it via both FW800 and FW400. (Thank you Gary).
I have a G4 Powerbook and have daisy chained until the cows come home and never had a problem. I have a very fuzzy recollection of trying to capture some of my Dad's skiing footage once and not being able to do it. I couldn't swear on the finer details but this has certainly got me wondering.
Randy,
The "read only" issue confused me as I knew the drive WAS set to "read write". That issue only came up through Final Cut and only when we attached the Canon DV camera. If it happens again whilst we are trying out our options I will open info and check while it is all connected but I think it was caused by a bad relationship.
Studio X, Gary, Randy,
Armed with all your advice we'll play around and see what happens. Thank you very much for taking the time to help and putting us on the right track. We'd be lost without you!
I shall post all results...
Double ohh

I'm using PSCS6 on a 500GB SSD. Do I still reach a better performance by adding a scratch disk?

Hi,
OS X and PS are running on a 500GB SSD. Since I'm working with a MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, I'm wondering if an external scratch disk would help to reach a better performance? The files, I'm working on, are usually between 300MB and 900MB.
I appreciate your suggestions.
Thanks,
Daniel

Photoshop PC version anyway seem to fill up the first scratch disk before allocating space from any other scratch disk. So if you has sufficient free space on your scratch SSD you don't need more scratch disk for Photoshop. A raid 0 of ssd will stripe data across ssd devices and my improve performance.

How can i make my external hard drive be the scratch disk with 1 FW input?!

Hello! I use firewire with my external HD AND my camera...however i only have one firewire input...i set my scratch disk for final cut to work with my external HD but when i am importing footage to my computer with my camcorder, i can not have my external HD plugged in, thus the scratch disk has to be set to something else to continue working. So how can i work around this problem?! Should i just change the settings back after i import the footage and it all goes to place?

I don't understand the need to daisy chain. I have one Firewire port on my MacBook Pro, and I use a Firewire hub. I've been connecting two 1TB Western Digital My Book Studio Edition hard drives (one for FCE and iMovie projects; one for the media files I create via export), and a Canon NTSC ZR200 miniDV tape camcorder, or a Sony Digital8 tape camcorder, or sometimes a Canopus ADVC 110, without issues. Why not use a Firewire hub? . . . except to save the small expense.

CS2 not recognizing external hard drive as a scratch disk

I have an external hard drive that I want to use as a scratch disk but while I can navigate to have Photoshop open files from the drive, when I go to my prefs and try and select it as a scratch disk, it's not listed as an option - i.e. Photoshop only shows "start up" and "Mac Hard Drive" as choices. But when I go in that same dialogue box, and look for an additional plug-ins folder, I can navigate to the external drive. It's also doing the same thing for a thumb drive I have and two other external hard drives which mount fine.
I have restarted the program, removed the Prefs file, and restarted the program again but it still doesn't see any of the external hard drives.
Any ideas?

mike,
Most drives are not optimized for Mac as purchased. Unless marked otherwise, consider that every drive you acquire, whether a fast-spinning hard drive or USB flash drive comes formatted as FAT so it can be recognized and used by both Macs and Windows machines. Use Disk Utility and reformat it as HFS+ "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)".
Just be aware that if you are reformatting your existing drives, you need to back up your data first or it'll be gone forever.
Neil

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?

Scratch Disk Error Has Occurred on Brand New External HD

Here are my specs:
Mac
OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion
3.2 Ghz Intel Core i3
8 Gb 1333Mhz DDR3 (was running 4 gb. an apple specialist just installed another 4 of Crucial brand. I wanted 16gb, but apparently I got a Mac in mid 2010 when it's finicky about it's Ram. Ugh)
Photoshop CS5 12.0.4 x64
Brand new 1 TB Toshiba External Used Only as a Scratch Disk,
Available: 999.35
Used 848.3 Mb
Files: 73
Folders: 14
Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
1 TB internal on the Mac that is checkmarked as secondary Scratch.
I'm working with Jpeg image files, mainly using Batch Processing. This error is usually occuring when I go to save my files, but today it occurred in the middle of using Content Aware. My crop tool is set at 250 resolution, and today I hadn't even cropped yet. Mac was freshly restarted last night and only a few picures edited after I restarted, so all memory should have been mainly purged. (although I had used content aware on one picture last night after restarting, a pretty large corner of a studio backdrop)
Should I be partioning my external? Is this TOO much space? My thinking was an empty hard drive wouldn't have to be searched, but I really probably don't know what I'm talking about.
I never got any errors when I was using my internal HD on the Mac, it was just slowing down after using Batch Processing and Actions. (I edit for a photographer) I do realize I should be using Lightroom. I have Lightroom 3, but I just don't have the time to learn right now, as this is the photographers busy season. After this fiasco and learning there is now soft proofing available in 4, I will make it a mission to learn in the new year!
Please let me know any other questions I can answer for you. Thanks.

Lots of options for ordering on the web.
Here are speeds from a previous post I made.
Internal vs external all boils down to connection type and transferer speed. Here is a clip from the web.
"Bottom line seems to be that a good SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) HDD will often achieve a 70 to 100 MB/s long-term average transfer rate. I don't know for sure what older IDE drives can do, but I know it is less. For an external HDD connected by USB2 (a slower interface than SATA), the rate is more like 30 to 35 MB/s (USB3 is faster, close to SATA II rates). Firewire 400 is a little slower than SATA II, and Firewire 800 (uncommon on PC's but on many Mac's) may be faster than SATA II. IF your external HDD is a SATA II and connected by a good eSATA port to your machine, it probably will exhibit a speed close to an internal SATA II drive."
What I get from this is the speed is increasing as you go from USB -USB2 - SATA - Firewire 400 - USB3 - SATA II - Firewire 800.

What's the Best Photoshop CS5 Scratch Disk Setup for New MacPro 12 Core?

Hello all...
I'm awaiting delivery of a new MacPro 12 Core with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD drive (Bay1) + 2TB (Bay2) + 2TB (Bay3). Normally I would partition about 60GB of one of the 2TB drives to make an exclusive scratch disk for Photoshop to ensure optimum performance.... with the new spec MacPro and especially the new 512GB SSD, do I still need to do this..?
Any suggestions of comments most welcome... as I want to try to get my new machine set up as best I can before I start copying over my existing data and filling hard drives etc. Photoshop CS5 and Quark Express 8 are my two core apps that I use daily.
Regards,
Anthony MacCarthy
Irish MacUser and MacAddict

ScarCrow 28 wrote:
…Well yes, technically you've got me on that I will admit. I'll try to rephrase to be a bit more accurate. The best scratch disk is one you don't need to rely on performance wise, by having enough RAM to handle the data performance needy tasks that would otherwise be sent to the scratch disk, when enough RAM can't be accessed by Photoshop…
…Hows that?
Still wrong, alas.
The scratch disk is used always.
See this very short (two-message) thread:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2847996#2847996
Excerpt:
[Chris Cox writes:]
…Photoshop needs to allocate scratch space for data, in case it needs to
write that data to disk later -- otherwise you would randomly fail with
"out of scratch space" in the MIDDLE of an operation…
Furthermore, Photoshop sets the size of the scratch disk ahead of time—the instant you open an image file or create a new document—basing it on assumptions the application makes taking into account your usual, past workflow practices, your settings and the pixel dimensions of the document.
Bottom line: the scratch disk always plays a part.
Do a forum search filtering the options with Chris Cox in the "Who" box, "scratch" as key word, and Photoshop Macintosh as the forum. You'll find some enlightening reading. Examples:
http://forums.adobe.com/search.jspa?q=scratch&resultTypes=MESSAGE&resultTypes=COMMUNITY&pe opleEnabled=true&dateRange=all&communityID=3341&username=Chris+Cox&numResults=15&rankBy=10 001
I'm not just insisting on arguing; I honestly want you and others to have a better Photoshop experience. Really.
Wo Tai Lao Le
我太老了

Best External Scratch Disk ?

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