Yes. See below.
Waiting for the postman (I have 8GB winging its way to me right now too. Will have 13GB when I install it).
--
RAID0 scratch disk.
You use Disk Utility to make a software RAID0 ('striped') array. You can use all of each disk in the set or just a partition from each. Since I only have internal disks on my Mac Pro, I used a partition.
Preamble:
Since hard drives are circular, the portion at the outside moves faster than the inside. The outside portion is the beginning of the disk, and the more your disk fills up, the closer to the inside it gets and the slower it gets. Use the outside of your disk for stuff you want to be fast, use the inside for backup. See
Lloyd Chamber's Mac Performance Guide.
My four disks are partitioned something like this (I have more partitions on disk A/B/C, but they're small and slow and at the back):
A: stripe | system | users backup | media backup
B: stripe | users | system backup | games backup
C: stripe | media | games
D: stripe | Time Machine
'system' is the OS and Applications. 'users' has the home folders of people I like (me), and is full of stuff I create. 'media' is stuff I watch and listen to. The partitions and their order provide the most speed for day-to-day use. 'stripe' is the bit you want, you can ignore the rest of my setup, though I think it's pretty awesome.
The meat:
Each 'stripe' is the first (fastest) 15GB of the disk. In Disk Utility, I assembled them into a RAID0 set (which works out to be 60GB) (look under the 'RAID' tab when you have one of these partitions selected). I called it 'scratch', and in Photoshop made in the primary scratch disk. Word to the wise: If you need to break your RAID set for any reason, set the scratch disk to be something else first, even if you plan on recreating it with the same name before launching PS again: Photoshop freaks out.
Setting this up will require some data-shuffling, so plan it out, use Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! and test your clones before reformatting/repartitioning (
erasing!) your existing disks.
Caveat: The stripped array will bottleneck on the slowest disk in it, so if your computer is doing a lot of disk access on one disk when Photoshopping, your speed boost will be diminished. I tend to not to have my Mac do anything else when Photoshopping.
Since you have two empty internal bays, if you don't need more storage, you may want to find two low-capacity SSDs (cheaper) and use those instead of HDDs. They'll be faster and you don't have to deal with data shuffling and the caveat. The disadvantage is the price and mounting them in the Mac Pro.
about menu, but I have something even worse:
