Partitioning the Harddrive for a scratch disk for CS1 & CS2

Hello all...
I need to see if there is a way to partition the harddrive on the work macs for the use of a scratch disk. We have a dual 2.0 G5 and a Quad.
The only thing is the fact that there are tons of materials on these macs as we are a advertising agency and are in the process of migrating all workable files to a new mac server that was ordered this week.
Can this be done without wiping the HD first?
Our apps mainly CS1 on some machines and CS2 on the Quad seem to run a tad bit slow. Could this be to not having a scratch disk for these adobe programs.
Or should we wait until the server has arrived and then just reformat the machines at that time?
Please help guys.
Dual 2GHz Power PC G5 & 4 x2.5 GHz PowerPC G5   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Never partition the boot drive. Even if it is used for scratch (and even if you set another drive for primary scratch the boot drive will still be used some). Keep your boot drive free of everything else except the system and applications.
Order some RAM, order a 2nd drive for each system. And a dedicated scratch disk - meaning you would need a 2 or 4-channel SATA host adapter for PCI-X.
You might want to use WD's 10K 150GB Raptor for boot drive (and yes, it works just fine on the DC/Quad G5s). The 10K 74GB Raptor makes a nice disk also and could also be used for scratch disks in a RAID. Use your original OEM drive just for local data.
Photoshop Acceleration Basics (pdf)
about the PS test
The above article and benchmark test utility can help determine what to expect.
I would speculate that you need a minimum of 4-6GB RAM, and 8-10GB of RAM might be in order; along with a 2-4-8 drive RAID as well.
Crucial PowerMac G5 Quad DDR2
AMUG: Sonnet E4P
Barefeats benchtest results
Port Multiplication Guide
G4 MDD 1.25 1.75GB UL3D 15K/10K RAID   Mac OS X (10.4.6)   SoftRAID 3.5

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