What's a scratch disk?

i'm a little confused with all the talk of scratch disks and external drives. basically i just want to know what exactly a scratch disk is and why it is better to put it on an external hard drive and any other basic information about this topic. thank you in advance.

I bet you've been itching to ask that question!
It doesn't have to be an external drive if you have a tower, like Tom said. It will just be another drive inside your computer.
You can use your computer's normal Hard Drive perfectly well as long as it has plenty of free space, but for maximum efficiency with really large projects, an extra drive is better.
However, don't feel pressured into buying one immediately. You can always fit everything on the one drive and see how it goes.
Make sure your MacBook has at least 20% of the HD free when you are editing and you should be OK.
Message was edited by: Ian R. Brown

Similar Messages

Scratch disk error

Hi all,
An error messages keeps popping up when I open files in photoshop. It says that my scratch disk is full. It even said once that my startup disk is full. I've spent the better part of today troubleshooting, to no avail. From what I understand scratch disks are basically your hard drive and photoshop stores information there when it uses the space for preform commands...? Sigh* So I tried to purge by going to edit>purge. It wasn't an option. I also looked for temporary files to delete manually but could find them anywhere. I'm not sure what else to do and all tutorials are lacking in information. I use photoshop cs5 extended. Any insight would be appreciated.
G

That is an input/output error. Sounds like something is causing the communication to the disk to fail. I've seen this happen with Spotlight indexing other disks, which can be stopped by adding the disk to Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy. But in other cases it may be indicative of the disk becoming too full, or directory issues. To examine the directory of a disk, back it up, and follow these directions on the disk in question:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

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 Pro 1st gen partitioning? scratch disk?

I have a Mac Pro 1.1 (1st generation is what that means...i guess). I just got a new 1tb hard rive to install in addition to the factory 250GB. I would like to use one or the other as the back-up drive, but my 250GB drive is almost full right now. Can i/Should I partition the 1TB drive to make 500GBs of it a backup drive?? what about a Scratch Disk what is a scratch disk and should i make some part of one of my drives a scratch disk.. i am a little confused about how to make the mac pro most efficient with the hard drive space I have.
I also just installed 4GB more of memory making the total 6gb.
Anything I should be aware of. I am trying to get optimum performance out of Aperture and Photoshop.
Thanks,
Joe

RAM: 4 x 2GB or 8 x 1GB are nice balance, symmetrical memory performance is what Apple called it.
Use the old OEM 250GB as backup and / or emergency work.
Replace it too. WD Caviar 640GB for system. Or 1TB Samsung F3.
You could use the F3 as 300GB scratch and the rest for data or backup.
These are very fast drives, fastest in 1TB for now.
To get optimim, a fast boot drive, separate drive/partition for scratch, 3rd for media, 4th for backup (or go external for backup).
Scratch something out? scratch that? erase - temporary work space.
I'd consider 4 x 1TB. Spread files and tasks out, or turn it into one huge volume (with two sets or more of redundant backups in any case!).
Download and read the manual for SuperDuper to clone and copy volumes.
Guides to storage, photoshop optimization, check the left side bottom list for guides and tutorials/pdfs http://www.macgurus.com
http://www.macperformanceguide.com has guides to drives, cloning, photoshop, more.

What does it mean by scratch disk full?

Hi
can someone help me with my photoshop
every time i try to save something it tells me that my Scratch disk is full.
what does that mean and how to do solve it?

Use Photoshop menu Edit>Preferences>Performance add additional scratch space. Then stop and restart Photoshop. It means the disk you have Photoshop scratch space on has filled up. Photoshop can gobble lots of scratch disk when your using PS. When you close down the space will be returned to you system.

What is the recommended set up for Final Cut Pro re: Scratch Disks etc

What is the recommended set up for Final Cut Pro with regards to Scratch Disk etc.
I have a lot of projects and at the moment they are all over the place on various external HDDs etc.
I just bought a new Firewire 800 External HDD and want to get everything straight but I'm not quite sure where to start...
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thank You

Media Manager (available from the File menu bar item) will consolidate all elements of your project together with a linked copy of the project file to a single folder in a location of your choice. There are various options to leave out unused footage, include handles etc. Safest way is to copy the files. Delete the originals when you are sure the copy works.
The user manual has a detailed description of how MM works.

Error message "cannot use the spot healing brush because the scratch disks are full. What does this mean? PSE9

Tried to use the spot healing brush and clone stamp and got error messages "cannot use because the scratch disks are full." What does this mean? PSE9

Elements uses drive space to make its calculations, like someone writing down measurements on a scrap of paper. How much free space is there on your hard drive?

What does scratch disk full mean? My photoshop elements 2 won't initialize.

What does scratch disk full mean???

If your scratch disk were really full, it would mean that there's not enough space left on your hard drive for PSE to do its calculations. But usually that error message means your hard drive is too big. PSE 2 can't see a 1 GB drive, for instance. It wants 750MB or less. If you use windows you can possibly get around it by partitioning your hard drive, if you think it's worth it. There's no way to make PSE 2 run on a current mac.

What format should my scratch disk be?

Hi
I have just purchased a WD My Book 1TB Firewire 800 hard drive which I want to use as my scratch disk in FCP
I'm going to wipe it clean first, but just wondering what format I should make it (Mac OS Jornalled etc) Or does it not really matter?
Thanks

Doing some more reading, this reference to improving Logic Pro performance...
" Be sure that any drive you use to record audio is formatted Mac OS Extended. If you are using a dedicated drive or partition for audio recording, it is recommended not to enable journaling. If you are recording to your system drive or partition, then journaling should be enabled." (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3834).
So all these years of reading and following safety over performance (well, may still be true as I haven't seen what % difference) might have been mislead.

What type of ext disk to use as scratch disk ?

Hi,
I've been searching this part of the discussions all day to find out what type (USB2.0/FW400/FW800) of external disk to use for FCP as a scratch disk. No luck yet. I've also checked the docs on this, but I couldn't find anything.
Did a Google search. Found all sorts of different setups people are using. No consistency.
I need some help on this.

No to USB...
#43 - USB vs Firewire vs...
Shane's Stock Answer #43 - Types of hard drives and how they compare when working with video
Drive types and how good they are when it comes to dealing with video...
USB 2 = BAD
Firewire = GOOD
e-SATA = more GOOD
Internal SATA = more better GOOD
eSATA RAID = more MORE better GOOD
4 gig FIbre = Just about the best you can get! (great for SAN networks)
External PCIe = Da Bomb! 5 times faster than Fibre
Shane

What do you guys use for scratch disks on iMac?

We're about to upgrade to new iMacs / Mac Pros and I'm wondering what you guys use for your second scratch disk? Thunderbolt dock? Thunderbolt G-Raid?
Has anyone successfully made their global scratch disk their fibre connected shared storage (Terrablock) and not had Premiere behave strangely? That would be the best option I think, but found that Premiere froze up a lot more when we did.

MikeJamesG wrote:
We're about to upgrade to new iMacs / Mac Pros and I'm wondering what you guys use for your second scratch disk? Thunderbolt dock? Thunderbolt G-Raid?
I have a pair of 4-bay Pegasus Thunderbolt 2 enclosures attached to my Mac Pro, and one of the volumes in one of the enclosures is my scratch space.

What to use for a "Scratch Disk"...

Hello All,
Prior to Christmas i lost my primary HD. Stupidly I didn't have a very good backing up procedure in place. I now have my G4 back up and runnung with a fresh HD and I would like to get off on the right foot.
Prior to the afore mentioned incident I had been using my primary for a scratch disk. It was a lack of education (ie, v.stupid) and I have now purchased a Lacie Little BigDisk (200GB) purely for FC media.
What I would like to ask is: Is there any reason to partition the disk? And, bearing in mind that I have not yet installed FC5, would it work better installed on the primary, or the external?
Forgive me if these answers seem uneducated, but to be honest in this area, I am...
If I could, I would like to ask a side question on partitioning.
As I mentioned, I have recently experienced a hard drive failure. Because of this I am now attempting to back-up everything I know, in the proper manner. I have been advised to clone my startup disk and I was thinking that If I bought decent external around 200GB I could partition it in half. My primary is 100GB and that would leave me with another 100 for music etc.
Does this sound like a decent plan?
I travel a LOT so I can only have 2 externals with me and they can't be too big. I thought with one as a scratch disk for Final Cut (my main work) and another for clone backing up and storage of music and movies etc...
I very much value the opinion's and advice from people here in the forum. Thank you for taking the time,
Regards,
Philip

The basic idea is that you don't want the drive that is playing back your media to be worried about doing anything else. That's why you don't want media on your system drive. It's got enought to do running the OS and FCP itself. Asking it to also playback media (although it can work) is really pushing it.
Of course you can store other files on your media drive, just don't ask it to do other things while playing back media files.
As for partitioning, remember that no matter how many partitions you have it's still physically only one drive. So partitions won't get around any of the above mentioned issues.
Good Luck
rh

What about Scratch Disk fragmentation?

I edit TIFF image files with lots of layers that range in size from 50MB to 90MB. With only 4GB of RAM, my system relies heavily on scratch disk performance for these large files. I have a non-system internal SATA HDD with an 80GB volume dedicated as a scratch disk.
I have read that it's important the scratch disk be a defragmented volume. I have also heard that Macs defragment files smaller than 20MB automatically, which I don't think helps me much.
My questions are, does Photoshop CS4 delete/remove files on the scratch disk after an edit session ends and PS is closed, and then starts with a "clean slate" when re-opened? Or do all the scratch disk files just pile up in pieces over time that tend to fragment the scratch disk? If so, does the scratch disk need to be re-formatted (erased) regularly? Thanks.

Marian Driscoll wrote:
If there is nothing on that 80GB volume (when Photoshop is closed) then there is nothing to worry about. Fragmentation is only an issue if the drive has files on it.
Thanks Chris and Marian.
I have been monitoring my scratch disk in Disk Utility and have noticed that after closing PS, the amount of disk space indicated as being used drops from about 1GB to around 60MB, with the number of files indicated on the disk dropping to around 40. When I erase the volume using D.U., then there are 32 files indicated as being on the volume.
So apparently, there are files being created by both the OS (around 32 files) and also PS (around 8) that remain on the scratch disk after PS is closed. Maybe these PS files are just "place-holder" files, because the amount of space used by these PS files appears to be less than 1MB. Relative to an 80GB volume, this seems rather insignificant.
Nevertheless, I'm now thinking that it may be a good maintenance practice to erase (re-format) my scratch disk once a month or so just to help optimize it. It's easy to do in Disk Utility.

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.
Regards,
Anthony MacCarthy
Irish MacUser and MacAddict

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

What size for OS/apps SSD and scratch disk SSD ?

Hi !
I need a SSD for my OS with the full CS6 Cloud and few others apps (but no games, pictures, songs or other personnal stuff),
that's mean between 70 and 80Gb. So I think I'll need only a 128Gb for that.
I also need a scratch disk, so despite I prefer a fast and large disk like the Barracuda 3Tb, I read it will be better to take a SSD.
My workstation is a 6x core, with 64Gb RAM, and 6x HDD for projects, render and footage (4K R3D and 1080p PRORES).
My questions are :
1) OS/apps SSD :
Even if I only need 80Gb (or a few more like 90Gb max) of storage, do I need to take more than 128Gb ?
Is it possible that the OS fill my disk with lots of temporary files ?
And the same for Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects or others apps ?
I know those apps will use the scratch disk, but maybe others temporary files will be write on this OS/apps drive ?
2) scratch disk SSD :
Like I said, I prefer larger drives, but as I understood, SSD will be better for preview and temp files,
and actually I'm working with 4K R3D footages and 1080p PRORES.
So do you think 128Gb will be enough for a scratch disk, to use with CS6, Blackmagic Resolve, and others 3D apps, like Maya ?
Of course I can empty them regularly.............. but is it enough ? Or 256Gb, or higher will be better ?
Or just a fast WD Velociraptor 1Tb or even a cheaper Barracuda 3Tb hard drive will be good enough ?
Thanks guys.

Thanks for your fast reply.
But, I'm confused.... if the OS and the apps can fill my disk with lots of temp files, how a 128Gb can be enough ??
Maybe you mean that those apps will fill the SSD with "hidden" files, but not reach the limit of 128Gb ?
About Windows, I didn't knew I could make a scratch disk only for this temp files.
Do I have to put the Windows temp files in the scratch disk also ?
And you don't think a Velociraptor with 1Tb will be a good solution between the speed of a SSD and the size of a HDD ?
My drives (alone or in RAID 0) are directly connected from the motherboard P9X79 PRO, trought the X79 chipset, and the Marvell chipset.
But I read that the Marvell chipset has only 500Mb/s in total bandwitch divided between the 2 drives..... I'm not really sure....
but even if it's true, I don't think the OS/apps will take a lot of bandwitch (except when I'll start an apps),
and it will surelly let the full bandwitch for the scratch disk. Don't you think ?
4 drives are connected to the X79 chipset :
- 1x SATA 6Gb/s - Barracuda 3Tb (projects)
- 1x SATA 6Gb/s - Barracuda 3Tb (renders)
- 2x SATA 3Gb/s / RAID 0 - Barracuda 3Tb (footages)
- 2x SATA 3Gb/s / RAID 0 - Barracuda 3Tb (footages)
2 drives will be connected to the Marvell chipset :
- 1x SATA 6Gb/s - SSD (OS/apps)
- 1x SATA 6Gb/s - SSD or HDD (scratch disk for CS6 and other "video" apps)

What's a scratch disk?

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