In a high end Mac Pro, what is an ideal scratch disk setup?

[Sean Dempsey]

Mac Pro Quad 2.66
5 gigs of ram
Scratch 1 set to an emptry Raptor 10,000rpm drive.

With this setup, I am really not hitting the scratch disk ever. I have PS set to use 2.5 gigs of ram, and I believe after that if it needs scratch disk, it writes to the remaining 2.5 gigs of ram before the actual disk, am i right?

That being said, I have read that have 1 large scratch disk all to PS is better than having multiple scratch disks. Right now, I have the 150gig raptor empty, used only for scratch, and also a 75 gig partition on another drive, but I don't use it.

With as much ram as we can get nowdays, what is the best setup for scratch disks, especially when using web-sized files?

 

[BornAgainMac]

Edit: [Nevermind. I remember Photoshop and it's scratch disk setup]

Are you refering to swap space? Activity Monitor will show you Page In / Page Out with system memory. The higher the number, the more it is using the swap space. To get a better idea, try taking out some memory on your machine and stress test it to see those numbers go up if you want to see your scratch disk setup in action. Or perhaps you can stress test it with the memory you have now by loading as much as you can on your machine.

Adding additional memory is faster than depending on a scratch disk setup.

 

[iMeowbot]

With this setup, I am really not hitting the scratch disk ever. I have PS set to use 2.5 gigs of ram, and I believe after that if it needs scratch disk, it writes to the remaining 2.5 gigs of ram before the actual disk, am i right?

Right, it prefers main memory over scratch if you have more than 4GB RAM.

With as much ram as we can get nowdays, what is the best setup for scratch disks, especially when using web-sized files?

Well, since your images are small enough that you aren't using scratch anyway, the answer is nice and simple for your case: it doesn't make any difference