At the Adobe discussions site, locating the scratch disc on a different physical drive is very highly recommended. In fact, the concensus is that it is mandatory. I dont have my head around the concept of multithreaded disk access at all. Where might a good description of this be found, preferably with a graphics aided explanation?
RAID-0, from what Ive read, would be ideal, but is just not in the cards for now, as most folks seem to be using two MATCHED hard drives. But honestly, I havent really explored their use in more than a decade.
Would a realistic solution be to transfer the file/files Ill be working with to drive 1, the disc with the OS and apps, before working with them.
Regardless, is the stock WD320 fast enough"
You misunderstood my statement: locating the scratch disk on a separate physical drive and controller IS recommended; the actual technical performance of that drive is vastly secondary in importance.
ie: it's awesome to have a dedicated scratch disk; a
fast scratch disk is just icing on the cake.
Using a partition scheme to place scratch files on the fastest area of the disk will probably not produce a tactile improvement in performance, although some improvement might be measurable.
This is IMO, a waste of time. Just use the whole second disk for scratch, and for nothing else whatsoever.
Multithreading is essentially just parallel processing, exactly like the Core2Duo processors (two physical processors) in the latest Macs.
More work gets done in less time, because multiple tasks can be executed at the same time.
It's not about the "speed" of the components; it's the multithreading that matters most.
Using a separate drive for scratch is not mandatory, nor is it particularly beneficial unless you are working with very large files.
ie: if you regularly work with 300dpi multi-layered CMYK tabloid spreads in Photoshop, you would definitely benefit from high-speed threaded disk access for the scratch files.
Web designers probably would not perceive much if any improvement, even with a 4 disk RAID-0 for scratch.
Before you get too excited about scratch disk optimization, be sure you have installed as much RAM as possible in your machine.
4GB or more is not "overkill" for CS3. (extra RAM above 4GB can be assigned as an image cache in CS3; this might be worth considering if you often work with large files)
The importance of adequate physical memory cannot be overstated, and should be considered of primary importance with regard to Photoshop acceleration.
Illustrator is basically just a CPU hog; memory/disk performance is not usually the main performance issue with vector programs, since the files usually consume very little memory.
Here's what I would do:
Install at least 4GB of RAM.
Install the second HDD(Samsung) and assign the entire volume as PS scratch, and use it for nothing else, thus extending it's service life.
Store and work with your documents from the boot/OSX/Apps drive within the OSX "Documents" "Photos" and "Movies' directories (depending on file-type).
Keep It Simple, until your actual needs dictate otherwise.
