I have a spare FW 400 external drive lying around. Will using it as a PS scratch disk speed up my PS use? I can't yet afford to add a second HD to the Mac Pro I ordered today.
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Will using an external FW HD as a scratch disk speed up Photoshop?
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In Photoshop CS2's setting pane (Preferences--->Plug ins and Scratch disks). If your internal hd is not available for temporary usage by PS, you can assign the additional 3 scratch disk drives. PS stores active files temporarily on scratch disk so that you can keep working on PS. If there is not enough free HD space (ie. starving for the scratch disk space, I know PS will bog down (which happened to my old Ti PB as it only had 20GB before I upgraded it to 100 GB). Both of my Al PBs have 80 GB so I am not concerned about the scratch disk space (I store files on the external HDs). Even my iBook with 40 GB (19.5 GB free) is managing PS without scratch disk space problems.seenew said:
Firewire HDs are slow. You're better off moving unused files from your internal to the fw hd and using the internal as the scratch disk.
As of CS2, it's really an undo buffer. In past versions, it was a weird attempt to duplicate what virtual memory does.seenew said:
Adobe offer a long discussion of how real memory, VM, and scratch are used. For interactive PS work, scratch disk speed only really becomes important if you use batch processing (actions) or have too little memory.