Laptop - Scratch Disk Conundrum

I have an i7 2760QM XPS L502x laptop and for several reasons it won't be possible for some time to add the SSD I am eying (Samsung 840 Pro 512GB or Crucial M500) . Therefore I was wondering if I bought a less expensive SSD, lets say around $100 and stuck it in an external eSATA or USB 3.0 caddy if I would see a difference in speed when using it as a scratch disk. If so, would placing the files I am working on on that drive be benificial compared to the slow internal one I have now and do you all have any recommendations on what caddy to buy? If it changes anything I am running Photoshop CS6 64-Bit.
Thanks ahead!

You'd probably be much better off with an external FireWire, USB 2 or USB 3 thrive, than with the puny additional space offered by an SSD in that low-price budget.
For the scratch space, figure on 50 to 100 times or more the size of your largest file multiplied by the number of files you have open.

Similar Messages

Laptop users: Any recommendations for a scratch disk for Illustrator CC?

Hello everyone.
I have been reading into scratch disks and their use with Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. It seems most of the discussions have been about desktop systems though. I am currently using just a 13" late 2013 Macbook Pro w/retina. 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM.
I actually have a new 1 TB external USB 3.0 WD drive, but I believe it's a 5400rpm and might not be fast enough to be used as a scratch disk? If not, I was thinking of either getting a 7200rpm USB 3.0 external drive, or a USB 3.0 external SSD. Perhaps something like these?
Amazon.com: U32 Shadow™ 240GB External USB 3.0 Portable Solid State Hard Drive SSD: Computers & Accessories
Amazon.com: HGST Touro Mobile Pro 1TB USB 3.0 Portable External Hard Drive, Black (0S03559): Computers &
Illustrator CC is currently just set to use my startup disk as the scratch disk. I don't believe I have run into any problems yet, that might have involved Illustrator needing more than my 8GB ram, and needing to use the scratch disk, but I am not totally sure, and I just want to get one setup anyways, for future use. I am also looking into using this with some light Photoshop use in the future also.
Those of you who use a laptop for Illustrator and other Adobe programs, what do you use for your scratch disk?
Also, where does Illustrator store these scratch disk temp files on a Mac? I have not been able to find any useful information through Google searching so far. Mostly just stuff related to Photoshop scratch disks. I would like to check the location these files are supposed to be stored to see if there's anything taking up HD space that I could take back, and also as a guide to see how much scratch disk space I should look into getting.
Thanks!!!

Yes, you could do it. Remember to follow licensing restrictions. Here's an article on how to import after installing the operating system:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25773
Keep around locked in your office an external Firewire hard drive with partitions formatted for both Intel and PowerPC Macs containing all the applications and the operating systems and default user documents you want to keep. These can serve as the basis for the migration assistent import.

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?

Using SD Card or ExpressCard for Scratch Disk?

On my old laptop, I know that the patch for Photoshop CS3 allowed using scratch disks on removable media. But on my new computer, I've updated all the software and cannot get these drives to show in the list of scratch disks. The expresscard and SD reader are both built-in to the computer so they are pretty darn fast.
What trick do I have to perform to get these to appear and set them?
Thanks!
Kevin

Do you have any mapped network drives? One annoyance (on Xp) is that card reader drive letter assignment appears to ignore drive letters assigned to mapped network drives and will always start assignment with next drive letter after your local fixed drives. If you un-map network drives your card reader drive will "magically" appear. (I get around this problem by assigning mapped drives starting at high drive letters.)

Switching scratch disks mid-project

I'm moving a project from my old Vaio laptop to my new iMac. I've transferred the media and project file fairly easily. Are there any pitfalls to be aware of if I now change scratch disks settings to an external drive? Previously everything was on one and the same disk. Now I've got 2 external SSDs and the iMac's internal SSD.

MM was very buggy in v4 and v5. So much so it was generally referred to as "Media Mangler" .
It was greatly improved in v6 and v7. I haven't had issues with the later versions.
The main problem with it now is the documentation is not exceptionally clear and a poor choice for how to handle the media can lead to a disaster.
Cheers,
x

*Noob* Which of these would I use for a scratch disk? How much Ram?

Hello, I am fairly new to Photoshop as I have used Lightroom ever since I've been a photographer. I recently got into Photoshop with the cloud as well as layering multiple exposures together. I never KNEW anything about scratch disk, until yesterday.
First let me stress, please answer my questions in layman's terms. I search the net before I start a topic on a forum and I read a lot of answers that seem to be responding to people who have a general idea of what is already going on. Remember, I DO NOT. Here are my questions:
A:If the scratch disk acts like RAM, do I need to allow it to use any of my ram at all? If so, how much? I have two Macbook Pro's, they are the highest model Apple makes, both have SSD drives, Quad Core i7's, etc. I unchecked my Macbook hard drive and told it to use an external SSD drive that is plugged in via USB 3.0. Would it be better to use an HDD instead of SDD? I have lots of hard drives to choose from due to being a music producer.
B:When I exit the program does it delete all the data it created? This question is two fold, does it delete it regardless if I saved the project or not? If I save the project does it stay there? What if I delete the original photo, was the photo imported into photoshop upon camera raw?
C: Like question A, how much ram do I choose? I have 16GB of Ram in each of my MacBooks.

OK, I have now copied your hillbilly text and pasted it into a text editor to change the typeface so I can read it.
I'll try to address the lose ends here.
A:…I have two Macbook Pro's, they are the highest model Apple makes…
Please forgive me for not being impressed. I just happen to consider any laptop a sub-optimal choice for Photoshop photography work. My personal opinion. (Please don't ask me why.)
, both have SSD drives,… I unchecked my Macbook hard drive and told it to use an external SSD drive that is plugged in via USB 3.0. Would it be better to use an HDD instead of SDD?…
I assume you are talking about using the external drive as your primary scratch disk, not as your boot disk. That is the appropriate thing to do. HD or SSD will both do the job fine, as long as they're physically separate, dedicated Photoshop scratch disks.
Obviously the internal drive will be your boot disk. Adobe applications really like to reside on the boot disk, the drive where the OS resides.
B:When I exit the program does it delete all the data it created?
This question is two fold, does it delete it regardless if I saved the project or not?
If I save the project does it stay there? What if I delete the original photo, was the photo imported into photoshop upon camera raw?
NOTHING is ever imported into Photoshop, ever. You use Photoshop to open your files exactly where you put them in the Apple Finder. And you save them wherever you wish, in the Finder as well. Your images will always reside in the Finder.
You don't import files into Adobe Camera Raw either. You open them in or with ACR.
Of course you need to save your data, not only when you quit the application, but at frequent intervals while you're working on it. Nothing you saved will be deleted by Photoshop. How can you even conceive and ask such a question? ?? !
If you ever try to close a file or the application when you have open, unsaved files, the application will ask you for confirmation in an unmistakable way.
Your images will always reside in the Finder, wherever you put them.
Photoshop does not have the abominable "Libraries" scheme that made me detest Lightroom when I tried it. Nor does Photoshop hide your image files in "packages" like the even more abominable iPhoto does.
Please forget anything you may be accustomed to in Lightroom and/or iPhoto, and approach Photoshop with a fresh mind, respecting it like the granddaddy of image editors it is.
C: Like question A, how much ram do I choose? I have 16GB of Ram in each of my MacBooks.
Again, you don't "choose RAM", instead you select a percentage of dynamically changing Available Memory (not RAM; see above) to allow Photoshop to use. Leave at around 70%.
Please see the following post for an important tip.

Photoshop using external disk as scratch disk without permission?

Hi, I'm having a problem whereby PS CS5 seems to be using my Time Machine disk ...
In the scratch disks pref pane only my local HDD is enabled.
But when I go to eject my Time Machine drive OS X says "Cannot eject, Photoshop is using this drive" or something to that effect.
It's a real hassle to quit photoshop, eject my drive, reload photoshop if I want to take my laptop across the room...

Nope, there's certainly no preferences or plugins on that disk.
Even if I turn on hidden file browsing I can't see anything like an adobe cache file on the disk either (although to be honest I'm not sure what that file name would be)
I wonder if it's something to do with Time Machine actually?
Anyway I'm shifting over to a new laptop with a fresh install of CS5 soon so I'll see if that fixes it

Photoshop scratch disk

Hi All,
I have photoshop CS2 on my desktop computer (XP). The hard drive is partitioned and I have photoshop scratch disk on its own partition (10GB).
I have photoshop CS3 on my laptop (Vista Premium, 2GB ram). There is only one hard drive in the laptop. It is already partitioned into three - C drive: windows + programs, S drive: system files, X drive: recovery.
My question is do I keep my scratch drive on the C drive or can/should I partition an external hard drive (250GB) and put my photoshop scratch disk on there? The external drive is via USB.
Thanks in advance.

Hi Dave & everyone,
Update on my external scratch drive.
When I bought the drive I ran all the way home with my new toy and quickly plugged it in to the notebook. Vista recognised it and I immediately transferred over 150GB of backup copies of my pics that I had burned to DVD's....I then read the instructions.
The drive was formatted as FAT32 and of course Vista is NTFS.
I promised myself that I would reformat it someday.
Today I burned my stuff to DVD's and formatted the drive as NTFS. I then partitioned it as a 200+GB (D)drive and a 34GB (F)scratch drive.
I ran DiskTT to see if there were any difference in the speed compared to what I wrote in message #17.
Here is the result.
Internal drive (C):
sequential write: 3036MB in 124.35sec = 24.4MB per second
sequential read: 3036MB in 95.57sec = 31.8MB per second
random access: 3036MB in 0.95sec = 3189.1MB per second
External drive (F):
sequential write: 3036MB in 173.49sec = 17.5MB per second
sequential read: 3036MB in 134.40sec = 22.6MB per second
random access: 3036MB in 0.97sec = 3136.4MB per second
bear in mind that the packet it wrote/read (3036MB) is less than the previous test (3563MB/3663MB)
Any thoughts?

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 FCE

I recently bought a new laptop. I had been capturing my video files on my old laptop to a external hard drive.
Today i received a message that my scratch disk was full. Upon further research it turns out i had not made the external HD the default. I have located the new FCE documents file on my laptop HD.
Do I move the filefolder to the existing file folder external HD.
or go in the FCE system settings and reset the scratch disk location? if so will the program know to move the files?
There are over 30 hours of video captured here.
My reference book has nothing on moving files.
thanks

I am in the middle of a project
I do already have the a older scratch folder on the external hard drive.(made by my old laptop)
This file the same name as my project file on the hard drive of the new laptop.
Do i still need to force FCE to make a new folder?
Or could i use the existing file on the external drive.
Its all new to me
Sorry
I have been using capture now. Then sifting through all the footage.

THE SCRATCH DISKS ARE FULL

I can not complete any action while in photoshop because the scratch disks are full. I have already run into the Performance Preferences and allowed the program to use the 7.09 GB I have of free space. What else can I do? Help please, I am about to throw out the laptop through the windows....

If the scratch disk must be contiguous, then the defrag will help. It's unclear from Adobe literature whether this is true. In fact, from the literature, I'd say it's not, as they only mention "contiguous" and "RAM" together (from my super-thorough googling). I certainly understood it to be contiguous, but I misunderstand a lot.
This Adobe doc might be of use to the OP:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/316/316693.html
(and doesn't defragging free up space too? I used to defrag unix boxes a lot and would save between 24 and 32k each time. YMMV )

Network drive as a scratch disk?

Is it possible to use a network drive as a scratch disk? I have very little space left on my only internal drive and don't want to have to purchase a drive just to connect to my PC for a couple projects.
Thanks!

Noel,
I have never tried to use any of my networked drives for PS Scratch Disks, but have tried with various flavors of externals, and while they worked, my benchmarks showed that USB 2.0 and FW-400 (IEEE-1394a) to be horribly slow. It was not until I tested a FW-800 (IEEE-1394b), that the slowdown was minimized to the point that things worked OK. There was no USB 3.0, or eSATA, when I did those tests, so I had no benchmarks for those connections. In the case of my tests, I was using a laptop with a single SATA HDD, which was partially full. Directing my Scratch disk to that one internal (with the OS, programs, Images, etc.), was still about twice as fast as the USB 2.0, and 1.5x as fast as the FW-400. With the FW-800, it was about 1:1, with only fractions of a sec. different for the benchmarks.
Not exactly PS, but I tried to edit to/from my NAS in Premiere Pro, and while it worked, it was far to slow to allow me to actually use that setup. I did not do a benchmark, but just tried, and made observations, and quickly ruled that out, as a possibility.
Just some observations, though they do not apply to the exact question posed by the OP.
Hunt

Scratch Disk Preferences

Hi,
I have Photoshop CS4
Is it possible to have 2 hard drives checked in the scratch disk preferences/performance, or only the C:Drive
My laptop hard drive is partitioned
C:Drive & D:Drive
Can I select both of these drives to increase performance?
Thanks
Phillip

It is not easy to explain briefly how the scratch disk works.
For CS4, it is covered in this Knowledge Base article on CS4 performance, which is worth reading in its entirety.
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404439.html

How do I clear up space on my scratch disk?

I'm borrowing a friend's Macbook laptop so i'm less familiar with how Macs use hard drive space..
Basically the drive is nearly full and I frequently get warnings about this that because it's full, I cannot work in Photoshop or perform certain other functions until space is cleared.
I've saved tons of files from the HD to an external drive, deleted them and emptied the trash, as well as frequently purge my temporary Photoshop files. However these seem to be very temporary fixes and as I continue to work in Photoshop I keep getting warnings about the scratch disk being full despite that I haven't added nearly as many files as I've deleted. It doesn't make sense.
I'm on a time constraint and it's not my computer so I can't get a bigger hard drive or anything.
Is there ANYTHING else I can do to clear up scratch disk space??

Probably worth running something like Disc Inventory X so you can see exactly what's taking up the space - could be some files you weren't aware of still lurking around.

FCE can't see my FCE files on my scratch disk

I have about 2500 feet of Super 8 film footage that was telecined to 2 mini DV cassettes. I transfered the cassettes to a firewire scratch drive where they sit, with .fcp extentions. I'm trying to teach myself FCE4 using Tom Wolsky's book, FCE4 editing workshop and doing well. I started at page one and now I'm ready to start working on my existing footage -- except when I try to open my files from the scratch disk, the file names are grayed out. And if I do get them imported by selecting 'all files' they are offline. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks,
Katierose

It's old Super 8 film transferred to MiniDV tape, which I then captured onto my external firewire drive attached to my Mac Pro. I had a One to One appointment at my local Apple Store to get a start on the editing, so took the scratch drive and my laptop (MacBook Pro0. Now I'm back on the Mac Pro.
Yes, the two .mov files are one for each tape and they are indeed about 13GB.
For the most part, they are edited movies strung together on the long MiniDV tapes and what I want to do is separate them out to individual projects and if possible, put a soundtrack on them -- music and/or v.o.
When I looked at the .fcp files at the Apple Store, they were fine on the laptop, and what I needed to do was simply separate them. I got some good instruction but the program was pretty overwhelming to me for one hour in the midst of shoppers and a time limit. Then I had to let everything sit for several months while I completed another project, and now I'm going back to them having forgotten most of it. And I really want to learn FCE as I love editing. In the interim I've bought a Canon HV30 (which I now have read has issues with FCE), which I haven't even used yet, but will want to shoot some new footage I can then edit.
So the immediate thing is to get the transferred movies into separate projects, and then go out and play with the HV30.
I truly appreciate your help and advice.
Katierose

Laptop - Scratch Disk Conundrum

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