Scratch disks

[chris26]

Just a quick question, ideally another internal hard drive is better, but failing this would I be any better off assigning an external hard drive as a scratch disk?

Thankyou folks.

Regards

Chris.

[tim]

Nope, external are slow, you'd be better off internal in most cases.

[Dan-]

Nope, external are slow, you'd be better off internal in most cases.
Not always true.

An external 7200RPM drive connected via Firewire 400/800 or eSata will be as fast as an internal. It's only when you start using USB that things slow down.

[PhotoJourno]

Before upgrading to a new system altogether, I was on a Laptop with 40GB hard drive, and 1GB RAM running Vista. This meant 500MB free of RAM from the get go, and about 2GB free of C Drive.

Anyhow, I started getting the scratch drive messages from Photoshop, so I decided to designate my WD External drive, a 500GB drive on USB 2.0 for all scratch. By comparison, the external hard drive made the process quite a bit slower. It did, however, work, which is what I needed. Sure, took me longer, but I walked away with the finished photos.

So for a work around, or last ditch effort, I would say an external hard drive will do just fine at the cost of 30-40% extra time for processing (based on my experience). Ideally, a secondary internal hard drive connected to the motherboard (Via SATA or IDE) would provide the very best results.

Hope this helps a bit. :)

[Faolan]

Nope, external are slow, you'd be better off internal in most cases.

Not if you use a e-SATA enclosure or Firewire as mentioned above. Firewire can power drives but e-SATA needs a external powerpack.

However, don't use USB it comes with too much overheads to be viable.

[tim]

99% of external drives are USB, so my advice is mostly right, but I should've been more precise.

An external disk can be unplugged or powered off, so internal disks are still a far better idea.

[PhotoJourno]

...An external disk can be unplugged or powered off, so internal disks are still a far better idea.

This was most of my problem (if you read the earlier post), the Western Digital Books (500 and 1T models, also 250gb) tend to go into standby pretty regularly, and so I remember waiting for the computer to wake up the disk (could hear it spinning up), then write and read from scratch disk, and then finally provide me with results.

Really not two ways to go about it. eSATA is almost like an internal drive.
By External, I am assuming we are talking of sub $200 off the shelf drives from Best Buy and similar stores.

[tim]

The only reason to use an external drive as page is if you have a laptop or can't put a drive inside your PC, and even then only if it's e-SATA. Just make it internal and use an existing disk and save the trouble.