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

Similar Messages

When I try to use the internal hard drive as a scratch disk I get this error "unable to set scratch disk- the selected directory is on write protect or non-writable media. Any ideas on how to fix this. It only happens in fcp.

When I try to use the internal hard drive as a scratch disk I get this error "unable to set scratch disk- the selected directory is on write protect or non-writable media. Any ideas on how to fix this. It only happens in fcp.

By internal, I assume you're referring to your systems (boot) drive. Is it, by chance, a partitioned dive?
Also…although many people successfully use their systems drives as scratch disks, over time you'll have better results using a dedicated drive for your media.
Good luck.
Russ

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

EMac and FCE using an external firewire hard drive as a Scratch Disk

I am about to purchase a new hard drive for use with FCE as a scratch disc.
I am looking for people who are "actually" using an external firewire hard drive as a scratch disc with FCE on an eMac.
I am interested in the following info.
1. What Make, Model, size HD are you using?
2. What rpm speed and cache size?
3. Any problems? Crashed HD's? Working good?
4. Do you have any other firewire devices plugged into your eMac?
I blew up 3 eMacs last year. Apple could not figure it out or anyone else.
I was using a Lacie P3 250/8mb firewire drive as a scratch disc.
Thanks in advance.
eMac 1.25ghz/1gb RAM/160gb HD/Superdrive Mac OS X (10.3.9)

1. What Make, Model, size HD are you using?
I have two LaCie Porsche drives, one 160 GB and another 250 GB (more like 159 GB and 233 GB in actuality).
2. What rpm speed and cache size?
They're both 5400 RPM if memory serves me. The 160 drive has 2 MB cache and the 250 has 8 MB cache.
3. Any problems? Crashed HD's? Working good?
The 160 GB drive caused me some problems, but I'm chalking most of that up to a bad FireWire cable. LaCie replaced the cable for free, and I haven't had any significant problems.
4. Do you have any other firewire devices plugged into your eMac?
Since I've got a 15" PowerBook, I'm limited to 1 Firewire bus, so the two drives, a LaCie DVD burner, and my Sony Handicam are all daisy-chained together. Having the Handicam on the bus tends to slow things down, but I can certainly capture to the drives with no problems. If I'm doing a lot of editing, though, I'll unplug the camera to speed up the bus.
I use the 160 GB drive primarily for backup, storing finished projects, and storing stock footage. The 250 GB drive is used solely for video capture and render.
The only thing I might caution you with is that the LaCie Porsche drives are rather picky about how they get turned on and plugged into the FireWire bus. You need to plug the power in, turn them on, and THEN plug in FireWire -- it won't work if you have FireWire plugged in when you turn them on. It's not a big issue, as long as you're aware of it. (It could be that my PowerBook is a little wonky, too.)

Add internal hard drive for FCP scratch disk

i previously had three LaCie big disk external drives on my G5 to work along with Final Cut Pro, one has quit workin and the others are ready to stop working also. This time around im gonna try to put another local drive inside the g5 via ATA bus. Is this a good move or should i go with another external? whats a good kind of hard disk to use?

No reason not to install a second hard drive internally, but personally, I think using that as a clone of your startup drive is smarter than using it as a media drive. When I have a stable OS/Application combo, I clone my startup drive to my second internal drive. If things go south, I'm back at work in a matter of minutes.
I got a sata card an a 5 bay sata enclosure a year and a half ago and haven't looked back. Raw drives are cheap and trays for the enclosure are about $25.00.
Just remember, Every drive will eventually fail. it's the nature of the technology. Design your workflow accordingly.

Help me to best allocate drive resources for scratch disks between 4-6 drives on my system?

I have several 7200 RPM drives as follows
OS/Program drive
Audio drive (367 GB free space & used for Cubase in conjunction with another OS drive; my OS drives are removable because it's simpler than partitioning)
Video drive (237GB free space)
Still Image drive (246GB free space)
Audio Sampler drive (100GB free space)
I'll be adding two separate 2TB eSATA drives in a short while.
After reading page 39 in. "An Editor's Guide", I'm still trying to determine where best to put my preview, capture, and project files in order to spread throughput loads to various drives. Now, I know this isn't ideal, the limited amount of space available will be a point of contention for the "can't do" crowd. The "can do" crowd will, however, be able to see solutions where the "can't do" crowd only sees reasons to fail. Also, I'm in the process of freeing up space on varios drives (except the on the Audio Sampler drive) by backing up some old files so there's some wiggle room.
As always, thanks in advance.

nw42 wrote:
... if you work with 200MBit/s and upwards footage (like DNXHD/ ProRes in high bitrate flavours or DPX file lists this is essential.
for codecs below 100MBit/s single SATA drives will working well - split audio and video data to different drives
I'm working with MPEG-4 AVC / H.264 (MOV file format) and DV-NTSC Digital8. Also, some AVCHD-Lite files from an older Lumix P&S (these will be archived and I'll not see files from that camera again in the future).
Thanks

RAPTOR 74GB Boot & PS Scratch Disk?

Hi,
I've just bought a 74GB Raptor and a Maxtor MaXLine III 300GB.
My intention is to use the RAPTOR as the boot drive for my applications and the Maxtor as the main storage for all my files. The internal 250GB stock drive will be moved to an enclosure and used as a backup.
1. How effective would the RAPTOR be as both a boot drive AND scratch disk for Photoshop ?
2. I know that as a drive fills up the efficiency declines. Would partioning the RAPTOR be an option. Perhaps 10-15GBs for the scratch disk?
3. Does anyone know where I can get my hands on one of these?
http://www.cooldrives.com/sata-to-firewire-enclosure-aluminum.html
I live in Ireland and Cool Drives don't ship internationally. I've scoured the web without luck. Any SATA to firewire enclosures that I've found that are available to me arethree times the price of the Cool Drive.
Quad Mac OS X (10.4.2) 2.5GB RAM

I did a 'Google'.
"You can assign scratch disk(s) in the Preferences: Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks screen. It’s possible to assign up to four hard disks, or partitions, and Photoshop will see them as one large storage space for the temporary file. Photoshop supports up to 64EB (an exabyte [EB] is equal to 1 billion gigabytes) of scratch-disk space—more than sufficient for most needs!
Regardless of the number of hard disks you assign, make sure the minimum size is three to five times the RAM allocated to Photoshop. Furthermore, the hard drive should be fast, and if it’s partitioned, the first partition should be assigned. Do not assign removable media, such as a Zip drive, or a network drive as a scratch disk. If you assign dedicated partitions that do not store any other files, de-fragging should not be required."
So I've decided to create a partion on my 300GB Maxtor of 20GB. The max RAM that PS can use is 4GB so 5 times that is 20GB. I currently habe 2.5 B RAM which I will increase to 4.5GB in the near furure. The Maxtor has had good reviews for it's speed so that fulfils the other criteria. Ideally I'd like to use a 36GB Raptor as a scratch disk and I may well do that sometime in the future using a PCI card. My only concern about them is that they affect SLEEP. But that's something I'll think about in 6 months time or so. In the meantime I'll back up religiously to the old 250GB stock drive. I had partitions on my old G4 and they never gave me a problem. In fact they got me out of trouble a few times. So 1 partition doesn't concern me to much.
I'm not a pro photographer but I am a keen amateur who does a little bit here and there for money. Mostly I just want an optimized system at a reasonable cost. The Quad will be my computer for the 4 years at least so I want to ensure that it has all it needs to keep me and it happy.
Thanks to you all for your advice. You can't put a price on your support.
Quad Mac OS X (10.4.2) Basic Set Up

Scratch disk on external drive

How do you get FCE to store captured media onto the external drive? I believe the scratch disk folder is where media is stored, so do I drag folders to the external drive? The drive has been formated to Mac.

From the menu bar, select Final Cut Express>System Settings.
On the Scratch Disk tab, click the <Set> button and designate your external firewire drive as your scratch disk.

External USB 3 Hard Drive as Scratch Disk

Hi All
Just wondering is it OK to use a External USB 3 500 GB Hard Drive as Scratch Disk. I have USB 3 ports on my PC and have internal hard drive also, but would it be OK to use the external drive as a scratch disk
Thanks in Advance
Ged

Perhaps you could do some benchmarking.
There are programs that can measure your drive's capability, or you can just copy a few big files to it and see how long it takes.
I suggest that if it can't reach a majority of 100 megabytes / second throughput for a sequential read / write, then it is probably not a good candidate.
-Noel

Work stoppage because of scratch disk error. The torture continues! Please help!

Hi, everyone:
I would greatly appreciate help.
In December, I began receiving the error message Could not initialize Photoshop because the scratch disks are full. I deleted all the large files from my hard drive, and the problem went away.
Now, I am working on a large Photoshop file (i.e., 585,155kb). I am working at 300 ppi for print reproduction, using multiple layers. I am opening each new image to be added to the master document in a separate Photoshop window. I set the resolution of each at 300 ppi, then crop and transfer to its new layer in the master file (using drag and drop). After I crop and transfer, I close the open window of the file I just cropped and transferred. No other programs are running. This seems to be fairly standard stuff.
All was fine (although very slow) until two nights ago. When cropping, I received the error Could not complete your request because the scratch disks are full.
Once again, I researched scratch disk error messages, and I came to the conclusion I had no choice but to increase my RAM. So, I upgraded from 512MB to 2 GIG. (I successfully opened my PC and installed the RAM myself, confirming it on the Properties window. A major success, as the RAM was costly, and difficult to find, so I saved some money and time by installing it myself!)
With great enthusiasm and excitement, I opened the master Photoshop file again and the next image to be set to 300 ppi, cropped, and transferred over to a layer. But, when I tried to crop, I received the SAME sickening message, Could not complete your request because the scratch disks are full.
How can this be? I have four times the RAM I had before, which was costly, and I expected Photoshop to work swift and smooth with this new, more efficient increase in RAM. I am simply bewildered.
I tried changing my Scratch Disks to C: rather than Startup, but then I received the error message You currently have Adobe Photoshops primary Scratch and Windows primary paging file on the same volume, which can result in reduced performance. It is recommended that you set Adobe Photoshops primary Scratch volume to be on a different volume, preferably on a different physical drive.
More scratch disk torture.
None of this makes any sense, and, while Photoshop error messages are upsetting, they dont explain what you should do. I am not a programmer, and I am totally stumped.
I know that someone somewhere upgraded their RAM and still received a Scratch disk error too, so I hope someone can advise me on what I need to do next. I cannot continue my work and just spent a lot of money on RAM.
Thank you!

Hi, everyone: Thank you for your help with my problem. I appreciate everyones time and feedback, as well as the openness to help and explain (and further explain) what I do not fully understand. I learned a lot more, as Photoshop always introduces new things to learn and figure out. (One has to be part programmer to make PS work!) I appreciated the clear instructions and simple analogies too (for example, the head vs. suitcase was great).
Good news: The Scratch disk error has subsided for now!
I believe (although I am not certain) that the problem was something very simple after all, and I am embarassed. Only time will tell if this was really the culprit, for, if the Scratch disk error reappears later, it may be something else all together that is lurking in the background.
For now, it seems to have been a problem that Peter K.s advice helped me discover...
Peter's advice was to check the crop settings in the option bar for the common mistake of specifying pixels/cm rather than pixels/inch. My setting was correct (pixels/inch). However, I inadvertently used my pixel width number as inches in the Width setting, causing a MUCH bigger file than intended. When I changed the number, the Scratch disk error disappeared, putting me back in business! Thanks, Peter, for pointing me the direction that eventually revealed the problem.
Could it be this simple?
I kept working most of the night to test drive, free of the Scratch disk error for now! I hope the good fortune continues.
The lesson for others may be to check simple settings carefully first, before diving into the deep end of Photoshop.
Meanwhile, the new RAM is speeding up Photoshop considerably, so I feel like it was a good investment and will probably help safeguard against further Scratch disk errors, which I have had in the past. Also, Ive taken everyones advice to consider a dedicated, separate HD for Photoshop Scratch disk use. Ill plan that as a future/next investment. However, technical notes say an external HD isnt a good idea, but I dont have capacity for an internal HD, so it will have to be an external one. I would appreciate any words of wisdom here. Also, I still have to research SATA-II drives too (which are new to me) and ascertain if I can utilize one on my system. It may simply be too old for this technology, if it is new?
If interested, I also tried several things:
(1) Checking the space available on my HD again The pie chart indicated it was approximately half full (there was 46% free space, or 34.38 GB free space). I'll look for more to remove, but it seems reasonable to have 46 percent available, I think.
(2) Checking the need to DEFRAG The Analyzer said a DEFRAG was not needed, and, indeed, the color chart that plotted the files showed only a thin red line or two (red indicates fragmentation).
(3) Searching for more TEMP files to delete. I found 750 MB in TEMP files to delete, so, while not a lot, there were some still there. Previously I followed these directions to safely delete temporary Internet files: Ctrl Panel > Internet Options > General > Delete Files > Delete all offline content. But, when I navigated to C:\Windows\Temp, sure enough, I found more. Directly opening C:\Windows\Temp seems to be more effective. (I have done it that way in the past too, but lately I was trying to follow the "safe" way I had stumbled across recently.)
(4) Checking my Photoshop Memory Allocation, which was already set at 85% (which may be too high, so I may back it down later, but I did not change it for now). I remembered adjusting it some time ago, but I had forgotten by how much!
I also read the links that everyone recommended, as well as numerous other documents I found across the Web. Some introduced still more to learn/understand, of course.
Thank you once again. Ill resurrect or repost if the Scratch disk error haunts me again later, but, for now, a happy ending.

How do I add a scratch disk?

Is it beneficial or asking for grief to add my external drive as a scratch disk? How can I do this? There seems to be no facility to do this in Preferences.

Generally speaking, an external isn't going to work. Your scratch disk would need to be at least as fast as the disk where PSE is installed, which means that externals are generally out, since the speed of the connection is going to mean it's slower than the internal, for real life purposes. In other words, even if the disk speed is faster, if you are connected by USB, the USB connection is the clog. Better to move some document files to the external and free up space on the internal for PSE to use.

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.

Why doesn't Illustrator recognize all of my hard disks when I go to select a scratch disk?

I have four dard drives installed on my Mac Pro. One is the 640 GB drive that came with it, one is a 500 GB drive and there are also two 1.5 TB drives. However, when I go to select the Scratch Disk in Illustrator CS5 it only lists the Start-up disk and Time Machine as my Scratch Disk options. What gives? Photoshop shows all of the hard drive options for Scratch disks.

You've posted in the scripting forum… You will have an audience of <= 5 here…

Network drive as a scratch disk?

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