Will I need to use a Scratch Disk with my new Mac Pro & CS3?

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.

 

Hi,

Here are some performance tips for PS CS3 from adobe regarding your questions:

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb401089

The idea of having a raptor as scratch is good and 2 raptors in RAID 0 is even better but it really depends on your workload.