Should I make a new partition for Photoshop Scratch?

[dogbone]

I just got a new 250 gig la cie firewire external drive and I'm a bit excited (sad isn't it) to get it up and running. I was going to create three partitions but I just thought that maybe it would be a good idea to creat a dedicated Photoshop scratch partition for it.

Should I do this or just let photoshop continue to use the internal disk. If I do create a scratch partition, what is a good size. Is five gig too much or too little?

 

[Blue Velvet]

I used to use scratch partitions for Photoshop but now use separate scratch disks.

But I've seen those scratch files get pretty large at times. 6-10gb might be more prudent depending on the types of files you will be working on most of the time. It depends on how much you want to give over to space that will remain 'unused' most of the time and also how much RAM you have and how much of that is allocated to Photoshop.

Scratch partitions also make handy spaces for testing beta software and dumping temporary stuff as well, though.

It's hard to quantify how much of an improvement on performance you may get but the idea that your system/app/data partition-drive is not being constantly written to with yet another lot of temporary swap files is somehow appealing.

Edit: If it's an external, then performance may also be compromised depending on whether the LaCie is a RAID drive internally and what type of Firewire connection you are using but I'm just guessing here. I've always used internal drives as scratch disks.

 

[timmillwood]

i dont understand why anyone would want more than one partition

 

[dogbone]

I've got 1.5 gig of ram with PS set to use up to 70% and most of the time Photoshop is not writing to disk but occasionally I'll open a bunch of big files and efficiency gets down to 60%.

All I know about the La Cie is that it is 7200rpm which is the same as the internal drive and it has a write speed of <10ms. I'm not sure of the write speed of the internal HD. I don't know what RAID is, but I can see the option in Disk utility, I don't feel like learning about it at the moment. I'm using eMacs, do you think there'd be much difference in read/write speed between the internal and an external with firewire?

I don't really want to use more than 5 gig as I've got another computer networked to it and I'll give that one 5 gig as well, so I suppose I could set the external as the primary scratch disk and the internal as the secondary so if PS needs more than 5 it can use that.

The only reason I'm doing this is an emotional feeling that I don't want lots of extra swap files writing to the internal HD all the time. It's probably irrational but I can't help it.

Should I just not worry about it and leave the internal as the Scratch disk? Am I just being too anal worrying about using the internal as a scratch?

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

Dont leave it on the internal. OS X already commands a large area there for it's swap files, so having PS use another disk is ideal.

As for size, consider the LARGEST mb/gb file you normally work on, double that, and then multiply that by 5, and set the scratch disk to that size........

It may not feel like much of an improvement right away, but when you have some large files open, plus several other apps, THEN you will notice the difference.....

Personally, I have an 18GB partition on an internal SATA/10K Raptor as my PS SD, and it works sooo GREAT !

 

[dogbone]

OK I'll do that.



Also, I'm going to have one partition and use super duper to back up one of my macs. It has an 80 gig drive but there is only 74 available. I always plan to leave at least 10 gig free for swap files so it will only ever have about 64 gig of stuff on it. So does that mean that I'm safe having a 68 gig partition (a few spare just in case) just to use as a back-up? Or does it need to be the full size of my HD?

Sorry about all these questions.

Thanks.