I understand that a dedicated hard-drive for scratch-disk is better than sharing your C: drive. I also understand that scratch disk is slower than ram. However, can two or more dedicated scratchdisk hard-drives boost performance? Does anyone know for a fact?
And does anyone know other methods (if any) to boost scratchdisk performance?
ei...using scuzzy drives, or better quality drives, or higher rpm drives...etc...
Last but not least, are the overall costs (to get better scratchdisk performance) worth the gain?
jules
Full Version: Turbo-charged scratch-disk
High speed SCSI drives are always nice. They are loud and expensive.
Gigabyte's iRam is pretty cool but only serves up 4GB.
Value is in the eye of the guy spending the money. The $55 I spent for my 80G hitachi scratch drive is about as much as I'm willing to spend. (Been thinking of buying another to move the windows page file.)
Gigabyte's iRam is pretty cool but only serves up 4GB.
Value is in the eye of the guy spending the money. The $55 I spent for my 80G hitachi scratch drive is about as much as I'm willing to spend. (Been thinking of buying another to move the windows page file.)
I have a 36G 15K RPM SCSI drive as my dedicated scratch disk and a second partially dedicated as scratch 2. FTR, these are Seagate Cheetah's and they are are NOT all that noisy. I paid about $150 each for them.
The processing speed improvement is significant, but only seen on large files when you tax RAM (I've got 1.75G allocated to CS). In fact even with large, multi-layered high-res images, I don't think I have ever tagged the secondary scratch.
The processing speed improvement is significant, but only seen on large files when you tax RAM (I've got 1.75G allocated to CS). In fact even with large, multi-layered high-res images, I don't think I have ever tagged the secondary scratch.
I'm only familiar with those drives when there are about 500 of them racked up around me.
I have a hard time figuring out when PS will use the scratch. I was printing an image 11x14 with a couple of layers. I didn't think I did that much to it but PS was running at 1.5G and the scratch was at 2.5G.
The one thing that has always been brutal on my memory usage is that free DOP plugin based on, I think, your resizing method. Not that surprising, I suppose.
I have a hard time figuring out when PS will use the scratch. I was printing an image 11x14 with a couple of layers. I didn't think I did that much to it but PS was running at 1.5G and the scratch was at 2.5G.
The one thing that has always been brutal on my memory usage is that free DOP plugin based on, I think, your resizing method. Not that surprising, I suppose.
Thanks Jack, Dark Penguin,
I've got a question for you: Does any of you defragment your scratch disk? If so, how often? ie...once a week, or once a month or perhaps once a year?
jules
I've got a question for you: Does any of you defragment your scratch disk? If so, how often? ie...once a week, or once a month or perhaps once a year?
jules
If you don't want to go with SCSI, you could look at the Western Digital WD360GD 36.7GB 10,000 RPM SATA drive for around $100.
I hardly ever worry about defragmentation on the PhotoShop scratch drive since it is only used by PhotoShop and seems to clean up nicely when PhotoShop exits.
I hardly ever worry about defragmentation on the PhotoShop scratch drive since it is only used by PhotoShop and seems to clean up nicely when PhotoShop exits.
I never defrag the scratch disks either.
On the upsizing Plug-in, yes that generates some significant size files and adds a layer at the upscaled edge-sharpening step. It will no doubt kick any machine to the scratch disk
On the upsizing Plug-in, yes that generates some significant size files and adds a layer at the upscaled edge-sharpening step. It will no doubt kick any machine to the scratch disk
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