Photoshop Scratch Drive?

Folks . . . I'm wondering what you're using for your Photoshop scratch drive.

Presently, my system has a 250GB SSD with Windows, Linux, and my programs installed on it. My system also has two 3TB WD Blue 3.5" drives. One of the 3TB drives is simply a clone of the first, which updates nightly. My scratch drive is a 100gb partition on the 3TB drive.

I'm wondering if I'd get better performance if I used a USB 3.0 portable harddrive for my scratch drive. My WD Blue drives aren't good drives. My one SSD is full, so I can't use a partition on that. I could add another, smaller (120GB), SSD just to be used as a scratch drive for around the same cost as a 1TB external USB 3.0 drive. I can squeeze one more drive into my tower.

What are your thoughts?

I'd probably go with a second SSD...

Edit: Just to clarify the reason why SSD vs USB 3 stick, with USB you're limited by the USB controller speed, which even on a premium motherboard and with turbo boost is a bit slower than SATA III in read and 50% slower in write speeds. Also, to my knowledge, USB devices use up CPU resources.

If you have adequate RAM, you shouldn't need much scratch disk. Look at your Photoshop efficiency and see if it drops below 90%. There is no need to partition anything to my knowledge. I would just designate your SSD C-drive as the scratch disk if it has a little bit of room on it. If not, then consider adding a small internal SSD (though, I guess an eSATA external SSD would work too).

Just about any SSD would be much faster than the HD. Find a used 64 or 128GB on fleabay for < ~$50 and call it good. (Do check the read/write performance, and avoid anything that's too slow.)

Thanks, folks.

On this computer (my main PS computer) I've only got 20GB left on my SSD, and I've run out of memory a couple of times using PS. The system has a two quad-cores (@ 3.06 GHz) and 12GB of ECC ram (server ram). It is a pretty robust system. The ECC ram is quite costly, and it is a special order, so I've held off adding any more. PS is set to use 85% of my ram.

In doing some reading, it looks like some people are needing more than 120GB for their scratch disk. I've partitioned one of my 3TB drives, and PS is now exclusively using that partition for the scratch disk.

I've done this so I can easily review what is going on in that partition to try to determine how big a drive I actually need for PS. Speed will suffer a bit for the time being, I'm sure. I don't want to purchase too small an SSD.

neacail wrote in post #16823737
Thanks, folks.

On this computer (my main PS computer) I've only got 20GB left on my SSD, and I've run out of memory a couple of times using PS. The system has a two quad-cores (@ 3.06 GHz) and 12GB of ECC ram (server ram). It is a pretty robust system. The ECC ram is quite costly, and it is a special order, so I've held off adding any more. PS is set to use 85% of my ram.

Robust indeed, ECC ram is meant for 24/7 data crunching, so I'm guessing photography isn't the only thing you do with it. My current machine has just 8GB, so PS is using 70% to let the plugins have memory to run on.

One thing you can do is get a Samsung 840 EVO SSD, either the 512Gb or 1TB one, and do a disk copy of your current entire SSD to the new one, then use your original boot drive as the scratch.
This way it's win-win because:
1. Much more C:/ space
2. Fresh drive
3. 256GB on old drive easily enough for scratch/temp/paging

And if you're really anal about SSD longevity, get the Samsung 840 Pro 512GB instead, since it uses the faster, more robust MLC chips.

Scratch speed is irrelevant unless you regularly work with very large multi layered documents in Photoshop. If you that first buy more RAM, or then put it on SSD.

tim wrote in post #16825339
Scratch speed is irrelevant unless you regularly work with very large multi layered documents in Photoshop. If you that first buy more RAM, or then put it on SSD.

I don't know about that. I had an issue the other day where my scratch drive dropped out, and I couldn't use my healing brush. I had plenty of RAM left, but Ps wouldn't let me use the brush without a scratch space.

Scratch space is important to have, but the speed isn't important unless you need far more RAM than you have.

I've got 32GB of RAM and 3 SSDs on my photo editing PC. I also have a decent video card for acceleration. Once the photo is loaded in PS, everything is done in memory for me. The only time it slows down is the initial read and the saving of the file.

That said, this is how I have my PC set up.
System & Applications Drive: 128GB SSD
Edit Drive: 240GB (This is where I copy my current project for editing)
Scratch and Catalogue: 240GB (Photoshop scratch/cache, LR Catalogue)

I also have a few 2TB WD Blacks where I store my photos after I am done editing and a few bare 2TB WD Blacks that I use for backups via a USB 3.0 dock.

Lighting quick, but that's due to RAM. Sure, PS opens up quick, but that's a one time deal. Once it's open, it's open. Having the photos that I am working on on the SSD speeds up the thumbnail generation and maybe the previews, but again, once it's in PS, don't think there's really any benefit.