Photoshop and Scratch Disks ?

If I have 4 Scratch disks does photoshop use all scratch simultaneously or does it wait for the first scratch to fill up before it starts to use the next one ?

It waits for the first to fill up, then uses the second, etc.

Similar Messages

Photoshop 7: "Scratch Disk Full" with a 1.T HD (too big?)

I bought a new 64-bit Windows 7 based machine with 8G of RAM and a single internal 1.5T HD (almost empty). The system is also hooked up to an external HD with 1T space (about half full). It uses a RAID system as well.
It installed fine. But when I try to run it, it starts the typical loading of stuff, then comes up with the message "Unable to initialize Photoshop, the scratch disks are full". What is frustrating is it then exits with no way of changing setting in Photoshop (say, to a smaller HD it thinks has space).
I this a known issue? Is there a cofiguration file I need to change manually? Am I missing a patch? In any case, whee is the layest Photoshop 7.0.1 patch for downloading?
Thanks!

There are several recent posts on this. PS 7 will not recognizea 1T disk, as it never existed in those days.
Bellieve solution was to create a disk partition of x mb for it to use. Easy to do with Vista, should be same with Win 7.
Here is a link to one of those discussions. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/617926?tstart=60

"Could not initialize photoshop because scratch disks are full."

"Could not initialize photoshop because scratch disks are full." This is the error message that pops up when I try to open my Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. I just installed this program on my new HP Pavilion Model h8-1214, which has 1.8 TB of space with 10.0 GB of RAM. I have read forums on this problem, but they tell how to fix the problem through Photoshop. How do I fix the scratch disk settings without being able to open Photoshop? Please help me with this problem for the Adobe Support team will not even answer my question..
Thanks.

By far the easiest solution is to upgrade to photoshop elements 10 or newer, which has no problems with big hard drives and has some new features you may like.
It's available for a thirty day trial.
Actually versions pse 3 and later have no problems with large hard drives.
Here are a couple things you can try which might work:
Option 1: Just after double clicking on the pse 2 shortcut press the Ctrl+Alt keys and keep holding the keys until you get the scratch disk preferences dialog
then choose your recovery partition as the First. This would only work if you have a recovery partition or another smaller hard drive installed that you can use as the scratch disk.
(i don't have a recovery partition on this computer)
Option 2. Shrink (shrink volume) your present hard drive down to 1 tb
Option 3: If you have windows 7 pro or ultimate you can use virtual xp (downloaded from microsoft)

Need Urgent Help! RAM and Scratch Disk Problem

I was recently working on making a gigapixel panorama. I made the panorama in AutopanoGiga and rendered it as a .psb. I went to go fix some stuff on the file and the first thing I did was content aware fill. The panorama ended up being 4 gigapixels before cropping. So I wanted to try content aware fill on a small portion of the image. I am using a 12-core Mac Pro with 20GB 1333 MHz RAM. I have an SSD as my boot drive and four 2TB mechanical drives, none of which in a RAID.
When I first installed Photoshop on my Mac Pro, I went into the preferences to change the memory and scratch disk settings. The first thing I did was set Photoshop to use 12GB RAM. Then I went to the scratch disk and noticed that only my SSD was set up as a scratch disk. So I unchecked the activate box next to the SSD, activated all 4 other drives, and moved the SSD to the bottom of the list.
So I started content aware fill and saw that it would take some time. So I left and when I came back a little over an hour later, Photoshop gave me a message saying that the scratch disk was full and it couldn't complete the content aware fill. Why did this happen????? I deactivated my SSD and activated four separate 2TB drives!
I went on MacRumors Forums and asked some people, and the only advice I got was to reset my settings. I did that, redid my scratch disk settings, and it is still using my SSD as the scratch disk! Can someone please help??

CAF is processor and memory intensive... most of the flashy demos of this feature have been on much smaller images.
CAF has also been known to kick RAM errors when it simply farts and dies. Is CS5 fully patched?
Wear a helment when you try to hit your head on the ceiling.

Workflow and scratch disk setting

To improve the speed on editing and rendering, what would be the best workflow and scratch disk setting for follows?!
1) video files create by Canon 5D mark II on CF card
2) Video files create by JVC HM700 (in HD, .mov format)
Above 2 formats I usually work with FCP on follow hardware ,
iMac 3.4G i7
8G RAM
Primary drive, 256G SSD
Secondary, 1T harddrive
For each project, video material most likely around 120G.
i) What would be the best setting for the scratch disk in order to boot the speed on editing and rendering?!
II) to save up the disk space on SSD, should I set the video storage on the 1T harddrive and the video n audio rending path to the SSD?!
iii) anything setting should I care while transfer both video format to FCP for a better speed for editing n rendering?
Pls advice!

don't put ANY media on your startup drive-- that would include renders. I'm guessing this is an imac with the ssd and a 1TB? what I do is have one drive for media, one for renders and a third for exports. That lightens the load considerably on any one drive at a time and arguably gives marginally faster throughput.
1TB seems like a lot, but these days it really isn't. I've got 10tb hooked up to my machine, with 3 x 1TB ready to drop into a drive dock for archives-- and I'm always out of room.
You've got to pay attention to the codec your cameras shoot in. Dunno about the JVE, but it's likely an h.264 variant of mpeg4-- do NOT try to edit with this. convert all your footage to prores LT or prores. HQ is definitely overkill.

Startup disk and scratch disk full messages

I use my mac a lot for digital photography. I use iPhoto to catalog, and PS Elements 3 to edit. I've been getting messages that my startup disk is full, and my scratch disk(s) are full; I can no longer save or print images from PSE3.
Please help me understand what these messages mean, and what steps I need to take to empty my startup disk and scratch disk.
Thanks
Greg

Greg:
As big as you can afford. There are 160 G external FW drives that are pretty reasonable. I've used the Mercury elite drives from OtherWorldComputing and have been happy. I'm sure others will pipe in with their good experiences with other brands.
Since the Mini doesn't have FW800 capability you can save a little by getting a USB2/FW400 model instead of the USB2/FW400/800 one. However, if you ever upgrade your Mac it probably will have an FW800 port. The price difference is about $25.
This link is for the Mercury Elite-AL Pro FireWire 800/400+USB2 and shows the prices for each type and size.
The The Mercury Elite Pro Classic is what I have. The price difference between the the two types is about $25.
If you can afford a larger one then do get it as you could then partition it to clone you current drive to one partition and make it a bootable partition in case of problems with your internal drive. Then use the other partition for long term storage, and day to day backups of user documents, etc. Even put you iPhoto and iTunes libraries on it.
With CompUSA going out of business in a lot of places you might find a very good deal on some external FW drives. Be sure to get one with FW so it can be bootable.
LaCie's drives are very popular also. CompUSA has a LaCie d2 Extreme Triple Interface 250GB Hard Drive for $179. If you have a store near you go into it and see what they have on the floor. Some don't have extra FW ports for daisy chaining. The OWC's do.

Raid card and scratch disk setup for FCP

Hi Guys
Can anybody tell me what is the correct way to set up a raid card and scratch disk for FCP if you have 3 x 2TB internal hard drives, with the OS on HD1 and drives 2 and 3 dedicated for FCP
Also with this i also have all my documents i.e work stuff, invoices, pictures, music ect from my old windows PC and used to have them stored on HD2 with the Windows 7 OS on HD1 - i have been told that it is fine if i put this on the same drives as FCP is this correct...?
i only ask this as i have been told how to do it in different ways by 3 people......

Thanks John, although i'm rather embarrassed to admit that I am a complete newbie when it comes to technical/computer hardware terms (i.e. I have no idea about different types of disks, other than a HDD and a SSD, or even what the difference is between your media cache and a scratch disk).
This means that after reading all the links you so helpfully provided hasn't done much other than making me feel even more stupid!
The best that I can conclude from what I think that i've understood is that I will use:
Intel 530 Series 120GB SSD for O/S, Programs (and Pagefile?? No idea what this is, sorry)
Samsung 840BW 500GB - Scratch Disk (is this the media cache?) and preview
Seagate Barracuda 3TB HDD - media, projects, and exports
Please tell me if i've got something around the wrong way....
Thanks again.

I am getting a Photoshop CC "scratch disk full" error, but my scratch disk is C:/ and I have 40 gigs of free space - help!?!

Why is Photoshop giving me this error when I'm not working on files that are that big given the amount of free space on my computer? They're around 1.5 megs each, .jpeg files (not even PSD files) and I'm only trying to resize them to smaller, nothing fancy at all. Can't even open and do one without getting the scratch disk full error - but it's not full when I look at my C:/ drive (even in PS when I check the scratch disks under Preferences you can see the multiple gigs free).
Help anyone?
Thanks!
C

The rule of thumb I follow to figure out scratch space says to figure on 50 to 100 times the size of your largest file ever multiplied by the number of files you have open. I have seen the scratch file exceed 800 GB once, an admittedly rare occurrence, but it often exceeds 200 GB when stitching large panoramas and the like.
As an example—and stressing that I'm aware that others have even more scratch space than I do—I keep two dedicated, physically separate hard drives as my primary and secondary Photoshop scratch disks and a lot of GB free on my boot drive for the OS. I also have 16 GB of RAM installed.
Additionally, if you only have a single HD, i.e. your boot drive, you'd need it to be large enough to accommodate both the swap files of the OS as well as Photoshop's scratch.

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.

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.

Hardware: SSD drives and scratch disks

Hi,
I am building a new system for Photoshop. Two quick questions:
1. I note in Adobe's system reqs it says Photoshop cannot be installed on flash-based storage devices. Does this include SSDs? Is there a genuine problem here (i.e. if my application drive is an SSD the PS won't work)?
2. I have not previously had a so-called "scratch" disk so I don't really know what it is or whether I need one, or more than one. What's the general advice here? - separate drive to the PS application drive? also separate to the Windows drive? How big? Will an SSD be a good choice for a scratch drive?
Thanks in advance,
Alastair

G'day,
In answer to your query SSDs work fine to install cs4 on bar the following I'm having.
I've built a new system using ssds.and is working fine bar one problem
Specs of the system is
I7 920 cpu, Asus P6t se mb, 12gb ram, 128gb ssd, 64gb ssd, 4gb raid 1+0 array onboard, nvidia geforcegtx260. I use the 128gb ssd as the os and programs drive. The raid is the data drive. All works brilliantly except when I set the 64gb ssd as the scratch disk the following happens
"Could not open a scratch file because the file is locked. Use the 'Properties' command in the Windows Explorer to unlock the file."
I hit OK and get this error -
"Could not initialize Photoshop because the file is locked. Use the 'Properties' command in the Windows Explorer to unlock the file."
Pressing ok then shuts the program and I need to reset cs4 prefernces and then it all works fine. OS is Win7 64 bit.
Now I have just got to try and fix this problem Anyone got suggestions?
Cheers
Onslow
Hmm, seems to have stopped doing this now after resetting the scratch to the ssd and then rebooting. All is now fine and wonderfully quick.

Snow Leopard & Photoshop CS4: Scratch Disk Error (app won't open)

Snow Leopard and Photoshop CS4 have at least one incompatibility worth noting thus far. If you have a secondary disc on your system that is setup to be your primary scratch disk in Photoshop's Preferences you might be unable to open your application.
In order to fix that, go to Macintosh HD/Users/YOUR_ACCOUNT/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS4 Settings/ and remove the Adobe Photoshop CS4 Prefs.psp file
Then Photoshop will open.
NOTE: You must leave your Macintosh HD as your primary scratch disk in Photoshop's preferences until Adobe fixes this issue.

HI Chris,
We are having significant problems with CS4 crashng and not saving work after it has been completed and saved onto our server. I would rather not re-format my machine. Any ideas?
Stephen Walker

Why photoshop shows "scratch disk full" error, while in preferences I see that my extra harddrive with free disk space of 216GB is active?

"Could not update smart object files because the scratch disks are full". Please help, I though I connected my huge drive to photoshop?

The rule of thumb I follow to figure out scratch space says to figure on 50 to 100 times the size of your largest file ever multiplied by the number of files you have open. I have seen the scratch file exceed 800 GB once, an admittedly rare occurrence, but it often exceeds 200 GB when stitching large panoramas and the like.
As an example—and stressing that I'm aware that others have even more scratch space than I do—I keep two dedicated, physically separate hard drives as my primary and secondary Photoshop scratch disks and a lot of GB free on my boot drive for the OS. I also have 16 GB of RAM installed.
Additionally, if you only have a single HD, i.e. your boot drive, you'd need it to be large enough to accommodate both the swap files of the OS as well as Photoshop's scratch.

Performance and scratch disks

hello!
i am currently working with the follow:
Mac Pro 3.5GHz 6-Core intel Xeon E5
64GB RAM 1867 MHz DDR3
500GB flash storage
external
G RAID 8TB thunderbolt
my question is regarding my photoshop performance, recently i have been working on some massive files, like huge! 133in x 65in with many layer etc! and I feel like the performace could be a little quicker.
Can anyone recommend the ultimate in external drives to use as a scratch disk - fast access and reliable.
thanks in advance

I use Seagate and Western Digital.. I think they both have USB 3 solid state drives. You might have a look at those.
Benjamin

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

Photoshop and Scratch Disks ?

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