Anyone made a Photoshop scratch disk?

Just got CS4, I think it's time to use a scratch disk with this version. Anyone use DD to partition their hard drive for this purpose? My 300gb C: drive has about 220gb free, but I'm unsure how large I should make the partition (which would be CS4-only.)

 

Do you have any idea how much space is currently being used for the scratch files in your use of Photoshop?

A lot will depend on what types and sizes of images you work with in Photoshop.

 

First of all, if you only have one physical drive you are better off not assigning the scratch disk to a separate partition on that same drive. Just assign it to the C: drive. I'm not sure exactly why that's the case, but I've read somewhere before that it will be slower than using the C: drive.

The scratch disk is used when PS runs out of RAM, so I guess having to go back and forth between the system (C partition and the D: partition would be slower than staying in the C: partition entirely. I assume that's why that approach is discouraged.

If you have a second drive, then you could create a scratch partition on that drive. The second disk would seem to allow simultaneous access to the system partition and the scratch partition, so that would probably be the better overall solution.

I'm no expert on the topic, but I believe what I have suggested is the commonly recommended approach.

 

I have two hard drives on my system and I created a scratch drive partition of 50GB on the non-system drive. It's a 1TB drive so I have a lot of room. I have Premiere Elements. It has worked well. One hour of video may require approximately 13GB of drive space. If I had only one HD I think I would just defrag it prior to editing my video. Your moving big chunks of data so you don't want the disk heads to be roaming all over your disk trying to write or find your files. Hope that's helpful.

Johnr2d https://www.wilderssecurity.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

 

The OP was talking about Photoshop CS4, the image editing program, not Premiere, the video editing program. The files used in Photoshop are typically not that large unless you really get into a massive adjustment on a RAW file, which even then pales in comparison to the video files you mention.