Scratch Disks

Hi

In Photoshop I was wondering which is the best drive to use for scratch disk space?

• The back - up Drive (D:) where there is a lot of free space?
  
  OR
  
  
• The C: Drive where I installed Photoshop?
  
  
  OR
  
  
  
• Start Up? Although I'm not quite sure what that is.

Also in relation to this, does it matter what Drive my Virtual Memory - Page File capacity is stored?




Thank You

Hi There should be no trouble in having your scratch file on your c drive. If your d drive is reserved for your "restore to factory condition" facility then you should not normally write anything to this at all. The page file can be put on to your fastest actual hard drive if you have a separate one…..otherwise its often best to let Windows manage it for you, it will do no harm to have it on your c drive also… If you have sufficient RAM then the speed hit taken by use of the page file is minimised. If using Photoshop a lot, then RAM is king, and on XP aim for 3Gb ……2GB as a minimum, and this wil help keep the use of the page file to a minimum. Note 1 using page file to make up for not having very much RAM slows down performance considerably. 2 The use of multiple "undo" on photoshop simply eats up RAM as each level of undo is held in RAM…if there is insufficient RAM for all the "undos" then the page file is brought into use (swop file) and this copying back and forth from the hard drive is a very slow process (compared with the time taken by actual physical RAM) Regards paws

Hi Paws


Thanks for the information.

Also I was just wondering what is considered a fast internet connection and what constitutes a fast computer? I ask because I wanted to tweak Firefox to make it faster using this link : FireFox Tweaks


Kind Regards

Hi that really is a tough one to answer!…….. Most of the info and comments on the thread are probably being made by "power users"…..so their standards may be pretty high….. Its a bit like asking a load of Porche 911 drivers supported by a few BMW M 5, and Mercedes (Kompressor of course) drivers what's the dividing line between a fast and a slow car?……….To most folks tootling along in their Mondeo it's all a bit academic! However if you look at posts 8 and 9 in the thread you linked to there is some further info on a practically identical question. The standard settings work well for most folks……..but for the out and out enthusiast..every little tweak helps……if you do this take an disc image to external media so if it all goes pear shaped you can put it back to its previous state. Regards paws

Thank You for all the information Paws.