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

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

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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.
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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.
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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.

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.
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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

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I've purchased a Windows 7 PC with 16 MB RAM, 2 terabytes and a 250 GB SSD. I'm going to load Photoshop on the SSD and the OS on the hard drive. Where should the scratch disk go?

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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.
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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
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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.

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Somewhere in the foggy last couple months, I know that I have read that before.
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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).
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C

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Photoshop external scratch disk to improve performances?

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