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supernovastar

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 8, 2007
16
0
I plan on purchasing a Mac Pro and CS3 when Leopard comes out (hopefully an updated Mac Pro!) I plan on upgrading the RAM to 5GB and was just wondering if it's worth getting an extra internal HD to use as a scratch disk for Photoshop? I am a serious amateur photographer so therefore will be editing a lot of very large images.
 
Although a scratch disk is always helpful with Photoshop, with that amount of RAM, it may not be as useful to become mandatory upon initial purchase.

I would see how you get on without it, because you can always buy a fast hard drive later and drop it in yourself for little time and expense. Photoshop scratch files can get up to 10GB in size, rarely larger, so even a small fast drive like a 10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptor will do.
 
Although a scratch disk is always helpful with Photoshop, with that amount of RAM, it may not be as useful to become mandatory upon initial purchase.

I would see how you get on without it, because you can always buy a fast hard drive later and drop it in yourself for little time and expense. Photoshop scratch files can get up to 10GB in size, rarely larger, so even a small fast drive like a 10,000 rpm Western Digital Raptor will do.

Mine are usually in the 15-30GB size....20x30 300ppi files with several layes and masks. 100 history states is what really adds up.
 
i agree with blue velvet, a WD Raptor 150GB 10k drive would be the best for a scratch disk. Heck, having one as a scratch disk, another with your OS and apps on it, and then a big storage drive would be better still! Photoshop moves alot of data around, so speed does count.
 
Thanks very much for the advice, I think I will just get a small drive to start off with, a lot of my images are 16bit 35"x11" panoramas that can be 500MB in size, so I'm sure the extra space will come in handy.
 
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