Possible scratch disk bug...

Running into an issue with the cropping tool in Photoshop CS4. When I choose a specific pixel dimension and resolution and then try to crop a photo Photoshop CS4 immediately uses up all available scratch disk space. When I say immediate, I'm saying that in about 15 seconds I get a message that my scratch disks are full from Photoshop, Using up about 250GB of free space in that time. When my boot drive was still a scratch disk I got a disk full error, and my machine teetered for about an hour on the edge of the cliff while I slowly deleted temp files. So it's a legit error. It IS using the space.
Can't seem to find any other notes about this around the net and this is a method I've used a lot in the past so I'm starting to think that it's something with my setup. However, I'm still getting the issue after simplifying everything. Closed all apps, opened the files locally instead of off the server, restarted numerous times. It seems to be completely predictable. All other functions seem to be fine with my machine and Photoshop. I'm running on a 2008 Mac Pro with ample space across a 3TB RAID 5 and separate boot disk [All connected to an Apple RAID card].
Has anyone else seen this?

danpoarch wrote:
Running into an issue with the cropping tool in Photoshop CS4. When I choose a specific pixel dimension and resolution and then try to crop a photo Photoshop CS4 immediately uses up all available scratch disk space.
This is not a bug with photoshop but a bug with the user.
You are telling Photoshop to crop the image in a way, so that you are actually enlarging it while cropping. what you are tell ing PS to do is so big that you do not have enough hard drive space to be scratch. Check your settings.
If you are setting the image size by pixels there is no need for resolution.

Similar Messages

Illustrator 2014: Scratch disk preference keeps resetting itself

Hello Illustrator community.
I have recently noticed that in my Illustrator CC 2014 18.0.0, the scratch disk preference setting keeps resetting itself. I'm using a MacBook pro with a single SSD, but I have an external Lacie Thunderbolt SSD that I got to use as the scratch disk for Illustrator and Photoshop. The problem is that if I set the scratch preference to use the external as the primary and my startup as the secondary, everything is fine and it let's me know that the change will take effect once it's reopened. Upon reopening Illustrator I double check and it's saved, and everything works fine. But if I happen to open Illustrator without my external attached, when I check the scratch preference, it will revert to using the startup as the main scratch location, which I understand. But the next time illustrator is opened with my external connected, the scratch setting is still defaulted to using the startup disk. At that point I would need to change the preference, close illustrator and then reopen to make sure Illustrator is using the external as scratch.
So for some reason it's not saving my preference for the scratch disk, while all other preferences seem to be saved fine. In Photoshop CC 2014, I can set the scratch preference, which works fine, close Photoshop and reopen without the external attached and then close and reopen with the external reattached, and it will remember my preference for having the external as the primary scratch.
Is this just the way Illustrator is meant to work, or is this possibly a bug? Anyone have experience with this?
I used Illustrator CC 17.x.x before this but didn't notice if it operated the same way, since at that time I didn't have a dedicated scratch disk to use.
Thank you very much, I look forward to your help and replies!

The last thing Adobe AI does upon a quit is to write the existing state of the preferences file to disk. If it is using the local HD as scratch, then that is what is recorded in the preferences.

Setting up RAID 0 and scratch disk from blank drives?

Folks,
Howdy again from NC. I've been setting up an AMD Phenom II 955 to handle PPro CS5 as well as possible, within limits. I built four of these machines for my math class, and am going to give CS5 a go on one of them before caving in and migrating my Production Premium to an i7/X58 platform. Maybe I'll get lucky and find this computer works acceptably with PPro, especially if I transcode my T2i AVCHD footage (likely Neoscene).
I put three new disks into my build yesterday and would like some pointers on setting them up, if I may ask. I have read through a number of posts on this, but don't find direct answers, unfortunately. I've never set up a RAID and want to get it right.
I have two Caviar Black drives for my RAID and a Hitachi Deskstar for my scratch disk. The Blacks are new out of the pack and the Hitachi has had zeros written to the drive. How to begin?
Anticipated issues:
* Do I need to format the drives in a certain way? I had planned on going into Disk Management and setting up a volume on each as my first move. Right now, they aren't even recognized under My Computer. Under Disk Management, all three show as unallocated.
From memory, I right click in the unallocated space and select an option for setting up the volume. Prior to this I only used straight-up drives, no RAID, and after writing zeros to a drive selected "New Simple Volume". It seems to me this is the move to make on the single scratch disk.
But how about the two RAIDed drives? We also have options to set up as "New Striped Volume" or "New Spanned Volume". If the answer is to set as as "New Striped Volume" for the RAID 0 I have planned, do I do this before or after installing the RAID software?
* My documentation for setting up the RAID on my motherboard doesn't indicate when to change my BIOS setting for the two SATA channels from IDE to RAID. Should I do this before or after running the software to set up the RAID? Do I need to go into the software setup with the two SATA channels already configured as RAID?
Right now, all SATA channels are configured as IDE.
* After getting my disks set up, I'd like to optimize my system for editing (turning off unwanted features, etc.). I've been looking all over for a link to an outside site I had bookmarked from a prior post, but lost it on re-install. Anyone recall what the favored link was? It started as a long page of instructions in simple typeface.
In the end, my disks are as follows (unless someone makes a case to use them differently):
OS/Programs - 1TB Caviar Green. Yes, I know the deal on green drives, but I needed to use this drive somewhere. I figured using it as the OS drive would be the best spot for the slowest drive. Maybe I botched this and should have used the following drive for the OS? I had transfer rates in mind and thought the Scratch drive should be faster?
Scratch - 750GB Deskstar 7K100 series. This drive was tops 18 months back when I bought it.
RAID 0 - Two 640GB Caviar Blacks (32 meg cache, twin processors). A bit older in the Black lineup, but the drive charts show them working quickly.
To ask one dumb last question, which will really show my newbieness, I use the scratch drive for page files (right? and what else?) and the RAID for holding any media to be worked upon and for encoding the final project?
I've been reading on this forum for over a month and am amazed that as I have the drives for a RAID, I can't find good links to tell me what to do. I know I am asking redundant questions here but have already spent two hours with the search engine and am only getting tangential anwers (ha! math joke).
Sorry to be asking such newbie questions all over again, but my luck with the search engine hasn't been so good of late. Maybe Bill's idea of creating a sticky section for common questions is a good idea.

about 75-80% of the systems we ship, ship with this config (others would be bigger arrays or no array)
1)OS
2) project drive 2 x raid 0
3) render to/export drive 2 x raid 0
4) back up (pick your poison)
while i cant speak to the older WDs (we have not used them for 3-4 yrs until now)
i can tell you with Seagate and now WD we have not seen the issue that applies to this inRaid 0
we are aware of the timeout issue this happens with controller cards and seagate or WD with large raid 5/6
simple answer use enterprise drives for raid 5/6
if you look at all the external raid resellers Sonnet etc they all use enterprise drives (mostly seagate)
so do we for large raids.
(drobo does not so buyer beware (green), we like to sell drobo without drives in it and use ours)
again BACK UP do not assume your raid 3/5/6/10/1 whatever is bullet proof, trust me its not
so even if you have a loss it should be at best nominal
something i dont think i have seen mentioned enough either
the single most common cause of drive failure (or any component failure) is Dirty Power!
dirty power can be spikes but are usually brown outs (very common in large older cities) or even low voltage coming into the home/office
this is the most common.
rather than a clean 120v you could see it as low as 105v
the other is being on a circuit with a large appliance.
ever see your lilghts flicker when the AC kicks on?
buy a good inline filter UPS. add 20% MORE wattage than your power supply
dont forget to add accessories LCDs, Audio interfaces, speakers/studio monitors etc.
Scott
ADK

Canon camcorder + scratch disk questions

I have a Canon Optura 50 (I now know that was not the best choice!). But, given what I have and I can't buy a new camcorder for a while, I would like some advice and clarification.
I have been following the thread on dropped frames and the do's and don'ts of internal vs external hard drives (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?forumID=936&threadID=680582). The consensus seems to be that (a) it is not a good idea to use the internal drive as the scratch disc, and (b) best to use an external FW drive and daisy chain the camera to FW drive to computer.
With the Canon I take it I cannot daisy chain it due to it's FW hardware quirks of not liking anything else on the FW bus at the same time as video capture, correct?
Am I going to run into major problems with my internal drive, since I use it as the scratch disk? I capture to the internal, and then move all the files to the external for editing in FCE.
Is there anything else I should know or do? I have created several projects in FCE, with success. I am slowly learning more as I go, and this forum has been a great help.
Lisa
iMac 20" Intel Core Duo 2Ghz 1.5gb RAM Mac OS X (10.4.7) FCE 3.5; Seagate 250 GB FW external

With the Canon I take it I cannot daisy chain it due to it's FW hardware quirks of not liking anything else on the FW bus at the same time as video capture, correct?
I have my Canon daisy chained through my external HD with no problems. Ever. So I am forced to believe either I have been blessed with enternal luck (knock on woodcrest) or convince myself the consensus that there is a specific problem with Canon cameras being daisy-chained has been the direct effect of pure coincidence and speculation. One will truly never know if a specific set-up will work until they try it out for themselves so go ahead and daisy chain that Canon away and see if you have problems.
And as far as using an external disk as your HD goes...
If you have the FC Express User Maual, take a look at Chapter 12 titled "Determining Your Hard Disk Storage Options" starting on page 153. If you don't have the manual feel free to check it out online here on Apple's website. Be aware it's a 26.5 MB link so it might take awhile to load but I'll highlight the juicy stuff for ya:
The manual states:
"By default, Final Cut Express HD uses the hard disk on which the application is installed
as your scratch disk to store captured and render files. Ideally, you should use a hard
disk other than your main system disk as your scratch disk."
It goes on to mention:
"The data rate of the video you capture depends on the format of the source video and
the codec you use for capture. The data rate for DV and HDV is 3.6 MB/sec.: Whatever
disk drive technology you decide to use, your storage disk’s sustained transfer speed
must be fast enough to keep up with the data rate."
The MBP can have a 7200 drive installed in it and that's not really the point. The point is it's just not reasonable to think that ONE HD, even if it's a 10,000 Raptor, can read the information to run the Operating System, Application, AND read your video/audio data all at once without expecting hiccups. You need your System drive to run your OS and Apps. and your seperate Scratch Disk for your Media (not a partition of your System Drive). Simple as that.
Not saying the other way isn't possible, it's just not recommended. If Apple doesn't recommend it then I won't regardless of status.

More than 1 set of scratch disks ?

i want to have more than 1 set of scratch disks in FCP.
is this possible ?
i want to have one project on one and then one on another,if so how would i save to each one ?
thanks
adam

I do this regularly as I have 2 additional hard drives in my machine. I set scratch disks on each one (for example name FCP doc on HD-1, FCP doc on HD-2). I have the corresponding FCP project on each HD. When they are long weddings, that helps me keep everything organized.
The downside is when you start up each project you have to go into FCP System Settings EACH time to make sure the scratch disks are set to the HD you want. A pain if you are switching back and forth between projects quite a bit.
Actually, each project saves in the scratch disks under its own name, so it is kind of 'what's the point' of putting on different scratch disks? I say that, then I do it Old habits die hard.
Sharon

Scratch Disk Full

I can't get on my Photoshop Elements 6.0 on my Mac (OS X) – I'm told the scratch disk is full. Please help!

Again, not possible. You'd better post a screenshot. Press command+shift+4 and drag over the area I showed in my previous post. It will appear as a PNG file on your desktop, named after the time you took it. Then come to the forum (you can't do this by email) and use the camera button above the message composition area to post the screenshot here.

Scratch Disk is Full

When I try to crop a picture, I am getting an error message that says my scratch disk is full. I have ample space left on my hard drive, so how can I correct this issue?
Thanks,
Jennifer Laraia
Message was edited by: PECourtejoie (email address removed to avoid spam)

Hello!
I don't know what version of Photoshop you are using (I'll post an example with Ps CS5, but it is similar in other versions), but I know a possible cure: check the units of the crop you are trying to perform on the image:
Are you sure that you want to crop it (for instance) 800x600 INCHES, multiplied by 300 PPI? (creating a 144 megapixels image!)
Set the unit to pixels, and you won't get that warning anymore, or change the PPI value to a smaller value.
What happens exactly? Unlike a real world crop tool, Photoshop's can be used to increase the dimensions of a document, and cropping a 1280x720 pixels document in the way the crop tool is set in the first example would create a 24.000 x 18.000 pixels one!
When you use the crop tool, it is also possible to make the document bigger by dragging the crop tool boundaries to the outside of the document. (make sure in this case that you increase the number of pixels to account for it.)

When starting Final Cut Pro 7.0.3 I am all of a sudden getting a message that says "One or more of the scratch disks don't have read/ write access" and now the app won't operate - how do I fix this so I can use Final Cut Pro?

When starting Final Cut Pro 7.0.3 I am all of a sudden getting a message that says "One or more of the scratch disks don't have read/ write access" and now the app won't operate - how do I fix this so I can use Final Cut Pro?

Glad you found the answer. But something seems wrong. FCP should be able to assign the scratch disk to your startup drive. It's not advisable, but it should be possible. You might want to try and figure out what's going on before what ever's going on cause other problems.

Scratch disk settings ignored

Hi,
I am using Photoshop CS5 Extended for Macintosh. (64bit) latest patch 12.0.4
I have a dedicated SSD drive and a RAIDed set of drives I am trying to use as my scratch disks.
In the preferences I have these drives checked and have unchecked all the other drives including system drive. (see attached image)
However when using photoshop it seems to ignore the fact that I have my system drive unchecked in the preferences and uses the drive as the primary scratch drive.
The drives that are checked do not get full. Yet photoshop seems to want to use the system drive first.
Is this a bug?
I work with very large files that rely on the scratch disk and as it seems to default to the system drive it gets full very quick and computer becomes unstable.
Many thanks.

Thanks Chris, that actually clears things up - I have 32gb of RAM and Photoshop is using about 80% of that,
so that's less RAM than I have available on my system disk.
When you use any application, the OS allocates swap space on the system disk: at least as much as RAM used by the application.
>> and will get a warning saying the scratch disk is full.
What are the exact words? The OS can put up a warning about the system disk being full, and MacOS becomes very unreliable if the system disk is full.
I'm not sure about the exact word, but basically the system says that Photoshop can't operate properly any longer, because there is no space on the system drive
and that I need to make more space before clicking on resume, but even if I make a a few more gb of space the resume function never works and PS doesn't come
back to life.
>> The 200GB drive listed as the primary scratch still has lots of free space when seeing this warning,
So the warning is not from photoshop or about the scratch disk.
Not sure, but I guess you're right: the warning comes from the system, but it is caused by Photoshop initially.
we just ordered a 240gb SSD as a new system disk, so that should hopefully sort things out...
Thanks for your help everybody!
C-:
It sounds like you need to free up more space on your system disk.
>

Scripting the location of the scratch disk...

Hey folks, I'd like to set the location of the scratch disk in Photo
shop CS3 in a javascript startup script. Does anybody know if that's possible? Thks, Will

Have a look at this thread...
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2318666#2318666

128GB Vertex 4 vs 500GB WD black as scratch disk

Which would be better as a scratch disk? The extra speed of an SSD or the extra capasity of the HDD?
I've tried to search around alot before posting this question, but i cant find good new information that directly answers this simple question.
My setup will be 128 agility 3 for OS and cache, 500GB Samsung spinpoint f3for media files and either ssd or hdd for scratch disk. I5-2500k@4,5Ghz and 16gb 1600mhz ram.

What is a scratch disk? It is used to write intermediate files, like the media cache files, the media cache database, the preview files and possibly the Windows pagefile.
SSD's have a nasty habit in that their write performance deteriorates over time untill they reach their 'stable state'. Trimming does not help here. Secondly, SSD's have a limited number of write cycles in contrast to conventional disks. Once that number of write cycles has been reached, the SSD is dead. Writing a lot of small files to an SSD shortens the life-span and makes it reach its 'stable state'performance very quickly. Not all SSD's are equal and I do not know how the Vertex4 does, but generally the performance degradation is sizable. The Agility3 is not very good in that aspect. This means that the performance gain from using an SSD for scratch disks is marginal at best. Instead of a single SSD, you may be better off with two conventional disks in raid0 for scratch. It will be equally fast, possibly even faster and last a lot longer than a SSD and may also be cheaper.
Do not be lured by the marketing hype of some SSD manufacturers about the fabulous writing speeds, sometimes claiming speeds of 400-500 MB/s. In practice and after reaching its 'stable state' is is more often in the order of 300 MB/s or even less. The Agility3 may even top off at around 200 MB/s. Your i5 CPU will have more limitations on your performance than the possible use of a SSD for scratch.

Mac Version of PS6 Will Not Launch if Scratch Disk is Not Set to Boot Drive

Mac OS 10.8.2. PS6 will not launch unless the boot drive is set as the number one option for the scratch disk. Even if I choose another internal drive and set it as the number one option for PS6 it will not launch. Is there any kind of work around for this? My boot drive is only a 120GB SSD so I don't want to use it as the main scratch disk.

Curt good idea but no go. This is a fresh install of PSCS6. I ran the Apple Disk Utility three times and Disk Warrior on the boot drive. If I leave the Scratch Disk set to the boot drive no issues, only if I change the order of the scratch disk or if I do not have the boot drive selected as a possible option for the scratch disk.
Where is the 'ignor ownership' option found? I did a 'Get Info' and I don't see it in that window.

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.

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.

Photoshop CS4 does NOT use RAM as scratch disk

Photoshop CS4 does NOT use RAM as scratch disk
as far as I can tell.
I have 20 GB RAM and still Photoshop uses the hard disk as scratch disk.
(OS = Win 7 64).
Can I force the use of RAM as scratch disk?
/Larry

Hi PECourtejoie,
I really try to understand this, please.
I don't know if 'Hitting the hard disk brings unacceptable slowdowns in my workflow'.
Because I don't know what unacceptable slowdowns are.
Any operation in Phshp takes time, and you always want it to go as fast as possible..
I know that if Phshp only worked against RAM instead of constantly saving to (and reading from) the hard drive it ought to go faster.
But I still don't know if this is the case, because there is a constant use of a tempfile on the hard drive's Scratch disk!
So far I understand that Phshp may BOTH work in RAM AND save data to the hard drive Scratch disk.
It could be possible that the writing to the hard disk happens when Phshp is idle from other tasks and that the reading only happens when data has disappeared from the Cache in RAM.
That could be a scenario where a Scratch disk on Hard drive doesn't interfere with Phshps performance, and an explanation why we should not bother about the Scratch disk on the hard drive.
But I would very much like to have some confirmation on this, IF this is the explanation of how the Scratch disk on a hard drive works without influencing Phshp's performance??
Everybody just seem to assume that Photoshop uses (some) parts of RAM as work space - I just need a better understanding of this. And some correct descriptions.
/Larry

Possible scratch disk bug...

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