Scratch disc full

I'm a bit worried here, as my photoshop program has started slowing and telling me the scratch disc is too full, and data could be lost.

I've run CCleaner, run spybot, cleaned the disc, defragmented, I think, for I'm not sure it will defrag on the SSD, and that's where the scratch disc resides (I think).

I'm going install a larger SSD, but for now I must continue as is. SO, can the scratch disc function be moved to the HD? I know it's slower there, but will have plenty of space.

The SSD appears to be dangerously full.

Thanks

In Photoshop, go to Edit/Preferences and to the Performance section/tab, and you will see your choices. Your Scratch disk should be set to a fast drive, but not to your "System" drive.

Do not defrag an SSD. They don't need it, nor is it advised. It adds extra wear and tear to them, and can actually slow them down.

In addition to what Tony said, a scratch disk should have its own partition. You can't really do that on a nearly full disk, but if you have an unused disk port, you could add another SSD and partition part of it for scratch only. The remainder can be spanned with the volume that is nearly full. If it happens to be the system disk there are a number of things that can be done to offload some stuff to other drives. For more on that subject, you can Google Ed Bott and SSDs.

1Tanker wrote in post #16960284
Do not defrag an SSD. They don't need it, nor is it advised. It adds extra wear and tear to them, and can actually slow them down.

As Kel says, they don't need it. Unlike a spinning disk with a read/write head that benefits from sequential data, there is nothing to be gained by grouping data on an SSD.

Don't partition an SSD, you'll potentially lose performance. I have my swap/scratch spanned between the system SSD and my second SSD and it works fine. The system disk is only used when the system boots and programs load, it's otherwise idle, so you can use it for applications too. I also see no good reason to have scratch on a partition, except perhaps performance on a spinning disk, but you don't want to do that.

Of course full disk / image backups will then take a lot more space because of all the image stuff on the hard drive.

Note that you can have more than one scratch disk.

From what you're describing it sounds like the operating system's swap disk and the Photoshop scratch disk are competing for the same disk space. You will get the best performance by moving your Photoshop scratch disk to an entirely different drive. See this link, especially the section on scratch disk(s): How to tune Photoshop CS6 for peak performance

My desktop computer has four hard drives and its blazing fast when running Adobe applications; The C: drive is for the operating system (Windows 7 64-bit) and installed programs only, the D drive is the scratch disk for Adobe applications (Photoshop, and several video editing programs), the E drive is for photo storage and backed up to external hard drives, and the F: is general storage for anything other than photos.

trailguy wrote in post #16959797
I'm a bit worried here, as my photoshop program has started slowing and telling me the scratch disc is too full, and data could be lost.

I've run CCleaner, run spybot, cleaned the disc, defragmented, I think, for I'm not sure it will defrag on the SSD, and that's where the scratch disc resides (I think).

I'm going install a larger SSD, but for now I must continue as is. SO, can the scratch disc function be moved to the HD? I know it's slower there, but will have plenty of space.

The SSD appears to be dangerously full.

Thanks

tonylong wrote in post #16959812
In Photoshop, go to Edit/Preferences and to the Performance section/tab, and you will see your choices. Your Scratch disk should be set to a fast drive, but not to your "System" drive.

Why not?

As long as there's sufficient space on the system drive then the scratch disk should work perfectly well on that drive. Far better to have scratch and system sharing a fast SSD then to have the scratch disk on a slow HDD.

In the bad old days it was advised to keep the scratch disk off the system drive because of the horrendously slow seek times (often slower than 10ms). But seek times on SSDs are many orders of magnitude faster, so the problem just doesn't crop up at all.

hollis_f wrote in post #16960700
Why not?

As long as there's sufficient space on the system drive then the scratch disk should work perfectly well on that drive. Far better to have scratch and system sharing a fast SSD then to have the scratch disk on a slow HDD.

In the bad old days it was advised to keep the scratch disk off the system drive because of the horrendously slow seek times (often slower than 10ms). But seek times on SSDs are many orders of magnitude faster, so the problem just doesn't crop up at all.

Ah, well I'm back in the "old days" and don't have an SSD, I have a "system" drive and then 2 large internal "regular" drives.

Of course, you could advise the OP to get one or more SSDs and then move on to the suggestions for the scratch disk, etc!

But if the OP doesn't have that type of system at this time, isn't the "old" advice still valid?

tim wrote in post #16960324
Don't partition an SSD, you'll potentially lose performance. I have my swap/scratch spanned between the system SSD and my second SSD and it works fine. The system disk is only used when the system boots and programs load, it's otherwise idle, so you can use it for applications too. I also see no good reason to have scratch on a partition, except perhaps performance on a spinning disk, but you don't want to do that.

Of course full disk / image backups will then take a lot more space because of all the image stuff on the hard drive.

Note that you can have more than one scratch disk.

There will be a small loss in total storage from creating a logical partition on an SSD, but there is no performance penalty.

It sounds to me like you have partitioned your system SSD if you have "swap/scratch spanned". Do you mean pagefile.sys? If so, it needs to be moved from the system disk if using an SSD. Swap files are needed if you run out of RAM. More RAM (if possible) is a better solution.

The way that Photoshop is used can have a huge effect on RAM and temporary disk storage used. The link referenced by PixelMagic provides lots of information on reducing the amount of RAM/scratch needed by Photoshop. Also, there's no such thing as too much RAM (I have 32 GB).

Hollis, what you say would be true for an SSD with ample capacity. However, I would be concerned about the longevity of a system SSD being also used for scratch storage.

tonylong wrote in post #16960961
Of course, you could advise the OP to get one or more SSDs and then move on to the suggestions for the scratch disk, etc!

Well, he did say he's already got one. And is planning on getting a bigger one.

Bill Boehme wrote in post #16961016
There will be a small loss in total storage from creating a logical partition on an SSD, but there is no performance penalty.

It sounds to me like you have partitioned your system SSD if you have "swap/scratch spanned". Do you mean pagefile.sys? If so, it needs to be moved from the system disk if using an SSD. Swap files are needed if you run out of RAM. More RAM (if possible) is a better solution.

The way that Photoshop is used can have a huge effect on RAM and temporary disk storage used. The link referenced by PixelMagic provides lots of information on reducing the amount of RAM/scratch needed by Photoshop. Also, there's no such thing as too much RAM (I have 32 GB).

Hollis, what you say would be true for an SSD with ample capacity. However, I would be concerned about the longevity of a system SSD being also used for scratch storage.

Indeed, although a decent number, SSD's only have a certain number of P/E cycles til EOL.

hollis_f wrote in post #16960700
Why not?

As long as there's sufficient space on the system drive then the scratch disk should work perfectly well on that drive. Far better to have scratch and system sharing a fast SSD then to have the scratch disk on a slow HDD.

Actually, not always.
It has to do with IO bottleneck as well. Yes a fast SSD can mitigate the problem, but if the OS and Photoshop are both trying to read and write to the one physical drive at the same time, things will slow. Of course "slow" is relative, and as compared to a spinning disk and newer iterations of the interface the bottleneck is not what it used to be.

Also the OS pagefile is something the OS likes to mess with in ways that are not always apparent if you don't take control of it yourself. One helpful setting is to create a specific permanent size pagefile, as opposed to dynamic, so it is not expanding and contracting. Of course getting the size correct is important.

hollis_f wrote in post #16961020
Well, he did say he's already got one. And is planning on getting a bigger one.

Ah, you're right, so much for me being helpful, especially since I don't have an SSD! They say that "ignorance is bliss", well, hmm...would anybody like me to "share" some more of my ignorance with you?!

Thanks for the good advice. I'll look more closely at them all when I can. I currently have 880GB free on the HDD, and 5.5GB free on the 56GB ssd (the scratch disc is apparently on the sdd). From the advice, I'm not sure if I should move it to the hdd, BUT, for an easy fix at the moment, will this work?
I currently have two 4gb ram chips and want to install two more 4gb ram chips, for 16gb ram. Can I simply plug them in and let the PC begin using them?

Thanks

Here's my system:
.
WINDOWS 7 PREMIUM 64BIT SP1

I5-34505 , 2.8 GHZ, 8GB RAM

NIVIDIA GE FORCE GTX 550-Ti

SSD 56GB MAX

USED - 53.8

FREE - 1.99

HD 931GB MAX

USED 51

FREE 880