need a scratch disk?

[mrbojangles13]

ok so i got a new desktop for christmass. i hate hate hate the spinning wheel of death. and am very impatient. just wondering if i need a scratch disk? i have 8 gigs of ram which can be upgraded to 16. im not really sure how much photoshop uses.
thanks guys

[Michael_Lambert]

What OS and CPU are you using?

I have my system setup now to use a scratch disk on a separate disk drive than my OS and found my workflow to move much faster. Running on Vista 64bit 4 gigs of ram.

My OS drive is a 150 gig WD Raptor drive and my Scratch disk is the same. Running a intel quadcore processor.

[mrbojangles13]

xp this is my computer here
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=XW8200-XEON3200-2-R&cat=SYS

[Zepher]

Scratch disk probably won't help. you are limited by the speed of your processors. Even though they are 3.2ghz, they are older technology and not as fast as current chips.
Example, we have an Intel Pentium D 3.0ghz and it is slower than my Intel Pentium E5200 2.5Ghz that I use to play HD on my TV.

[GregSteer]

Here's hoping thats XP Pro 64-Bit your running or all that RAM over 4Gb won't be used.

An additional scratch disk is always a good idea to dump the PS Scratch files, LR database/previews on etc.

Also you don't mention when you're getting this wheel of death, Lightroom, Photoshop, another program? When does it happen? On image opening, copying, program opening, filter running in PS ?

[mrbojangles13]

xp 32 bit oh no

[mrbojangles13]

wheel of death (waiting) when i am working on my images. lets just say i am dodging. i dodge an area and i have to wait to see the results of what i just did

[René Damkot]

What software?

If I use Photoshop on my Powerbook G4/1.33 with 1.25Gb, I don't get that kind of sluggishness (pizzawheel while dodging), unless I have way too many files open, or it's a *big* file (think: 500Mb+)

LR on the other hand is barely usable....

[GregSteer]

Just testing doding/burning on a 60mb psd, not massive I know, now slow down, thats on a 3.0Gz Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM, OS on a 36gb Raptor, scratch disk on a seperate 36gb Raptor.

Without actually being in front of you system it's damn hard to tell where the bottle neck actually is, could you bring up task manager (ctrl-alt-del) and monitor your CPU usage and RAM usage when trying the think that slows down? If the CPU's toppiong 100% or the Available Physical Memory is low, ie <100mb then either could be the problem, if not it could be HD.

[rklepper]

I have 16 GB Ram on my Mac Pro and I wait for nothing. Not sure why your hp has 8 GB Ram, but they chose just to put in XP Pro 32 bit. That makes no sense to me.

[FZ1]

wheel of death (waiting) when i am working on my images. lets just say i am dodging. i dodge an area and i have to wait to see the results of what i just did
32 Bit OS's can only use 4GB of RAM and XP will actually allocate almost 1GB to hardware so you end up with about 3.2GB. Running dual Xenon CPU's @ 3.2GHz you should not be having CPU bandwidth issues. What version of Photoshop are you using? Older versions are not optimized for multicore/multiprocessor CPU's so that may be it. CS4 is optimized for 64 bit so if you upgrade to a 64 bit OS you can use all the RAM you have plus it should run CS4 like a champ.