Are scratch disks a thing of the past?

I'm thinking of upgrading my old desktop to a new laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme (specs below). This laptop will have only one internal drive, a 1TB SSD of the NVMe variety. In the old days with spinning hard drives and expensive RAM, it was expected to have a dedicated HDD to serve as Photoshop's scratch space, and the scratch disk was best kept separate from the main OS drive and file drives. Now that we have supercharged M.2 NVMe SSDs, do we even need to worry about scratch drives anymore? Can't I use the 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD for everything, including the operating system, the Photoshop scratch partition, as well as file storage? I plan on backing up my image files to the Cloud, so I don't want additional drives if I don't really need them.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme $2,200
8th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-8850H 6 Core Processor with vPro™ (2.60GHz)
15.6” 4K UHD HDR (3840 x 2160) IPS 100% Adobe RGB display
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB GPU
32 GB DDR4 2666 MHz RAM
1 TB Solid State Drive, PCIe-NVME OPAL2.0 M.2

Depends on how full your drive gets and how big your photoshop files are. But you sure can use the internal drive for all.

It has nothing to do with with the HD being supercharged, it is the amount of ram available these days, and to a lesser extent, better RAM management by the OS and applications.

That said, if you Ps needs more than what you have available, it will still go to a scratch disk.

Adobe/Photoshop recommendations "Optimize Photoshop CC performanc" are at https://helpx.adobe.co​m …oshop-cc-performance.html. Scroll down for the recommendation specific to scratch disks. Take note of the statement

Despite the SSD in my mac I still need to have an external disk as Ps files get get big fast, it stops me running into disk full warnings. Even with a relatively slow 7200rpm HDD Ps is just as quick. If you have a huge SSD in your computer or only generate small Ps files then you probably won't need an external disk but they are not a think of the past at all. Ask any video editor that question... And these days you can get very fast R/W speeds through Thunderbolt and an SSD like Samsung's X5 unit.

I do the same. I did create a partition on my internal SSD as a "work area". It's nice to be able to put some projects there temporarily if I need to travel or if I want a little better performance. Most stuff lives on external spinning disks and is cloned/backed up to spinning disks.

The work area is also my scratch disk.

Left Handed Brisket wrote in post #18837372
I did create a partition on my internal SSD as a "work area". It's nice to be able to put some projects there temporarily if I need to travel or if I want a little better performance. Most stuff lives on external spinning disks and is cloned/backed up to spinning disks.

The work area is also my scratch disk.

Spinning disks need to be partitioned because the outer volume of the HDD spins faster than the inner volume. So by assigning the scratch space to the outermost volume, you thereby reserve the fastest read/write times for Photoshops scratch partition.

In contrast, since solid state drives do not spin, all volumes on the SSD are accessed equally fast. So, I see no need to partition a scratch space within the SSD. As long as there is enough empty space on the SSD for Photoshop to scratch on, then partitioning the SSD for either your working space or for Photoshop's scratch space would seem totally unnecessary, except for the most OCD among us who like to label and sort everything (a tendency which I myself battle).

What am I missing?

Keeping all my work stuff on the partition means that if/when I come close to filling it up it won't f$@k with the start up disk. That's the main thing.

Combine that with having done the same since my PowerMac 8500, and yeah, it's comforting just seeing it sitting there and knowing if I need something important its in there rather than hiding the Documents folder or somewhere on the Desktop along with whatever other gazillion 50 to 100k sized personal files might be floating around.

texshooter wrote in post #18837484
Spinning disks need to be partitioned because the outer volume of the HDD spins faster than the inner volume. So by assigning the scratch space to the outermost volume, you thereby reserve the fastest read/write times for Photoshops scratch partition.

In the “old” days when HDD’s were the norm, it was possible to use a utility that would optimize a HDD through a process called “short stroking”. It was essentially a process where the most frequently accessed data was moved to the outer area of the disk. Some of the utilities to do this were quite sophisticated. I assume they still exist but with the popularity of SSD’s, they may not be supported.

I can remember short stroking a drive in the 1990’s, very small by today’s standard. The drive had been in use about a a year and Windows defrag was run several times and then the drive benchmarked. We then used a short stroking utility and as I recall got about a 2X increase in read/write speed.

P. S. - I was always fascinated by the Window defrag utility because you could see it “working” as it read and rewrote the data. As bst I recall, little blue and green boxes moved around the screen showing the sectors. Hmmm, I’m showing my age.

Two Hot Shoes wrote in post #18837152
Depends on
- how full your drive gets and
- how big your photoshop files are.

But you sure can use the internal drive for all.

just to add;

- How much Ram you have available (more RAM means PS is less likely to need to hit a "scratch disk")

The bottom line is that with a 64bit OS, and any version of 64 bit PS (PSCS 4 or later) Photoshop FINALLY gave itself the ability to access more than the first 4GB of ram. PS was a VERY late bloomer in this regard. In those days one absolutely was going to hit the scratch disk due to the lack of ability to see more than that first 4GB of ram. There were workarounds if you had a 64bit OS that COULD use all the ram you wanted,.

I still tell PS what to use for a scratch disk in case it does need one;
I give PS access to my fastest SSD to use as a scratch disk, OR,. I make a "RamDisk" and tell PS to use that.

texshooter wrote in post #18837484
Spinning disks need to be partitioned because the outer volume of the HDD spins faster than the inner volume. So by assigning the scratch space to the outermost volume, you thereby reserve the fastest read/write times for Photoshops scratch partition.

In contrast, since solid state drives do not spin, all volumes on the SSD are accessed equally fast. So, I see no need to partition a scratch space within the SSD. As long as there is enough empty space on the SSD for Photoshop to scratch on, then partitioning the SSD for either your working space or for Photoshop's scratch space would seem totally unnecessary, except for the most OCD among us who like to label and sort everything (a tendency which I myself battle).

What am I missing?

This is all true, and I have learned to accept this axiom, that said, after decades of compartmentalization data into nice little partitions, I can easily see the "organizational" utility of still using partitions on an SSD. Like I say, I opted to learn the new trick on my latest SSD equipped workstation, but it was a hard lesson to learn (or hard to "unlearn" what I had always done)

I spent a number of years associated with CAD/CAM software running in minicomputers and microcomputers. My engineering counterpart (I was in Product Management) explained scratch disk to me
You want to minimized 'head thrashing' by

• putting scratch disk area on a DIFFERENT drive (if possible)
  
• making scratch disk area a CONTIGUOUS space on the drive (so heads do not have to shift randomly -- and thrashing in and out -- a lot to access that space)
  

I partitioned off a section of my M.2 to be a couple of GIG over my RAM spec. (PS will not boot if you don't have at least this amount available)

Lenovo just released their 2nd gen ThinkPad X1 Extreme laptop (fully loaded).

They want $3,200 for last year's 1st gen model. That's $1,000 more than what it was one month ago. Shouldn't prior model prices go down, not up?

The 2nd gen costs $4,100!. Ouch!

And their last year gen 1 mid-range model jumped up from $1,450 to $2,150.

They must be out of their mind.

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #18837719
This is all true, and I have learned to accept this axiom, that said, after decades of compartmentalization data into nice little partitions, I can easily see the "organizational" utility of still using partitions on an SSD. Like I say, I opted to learn the new trick on my latest SSD equipped workstation, but it was a hard lesson to learn (or hard to "unlearn" what I had always done)

Same here.

I have set the kids up with their own coding computer and have let them do whatever they want with it. Along with this comes a torrent of questions typical of 10 year old boys. My hope was to just turn them loose but that was super shortsighted.

Last week we were talking about spinning disks vs SSD, formatting drives, blah, blah, blah. I'm trying to go make dinner and start walking off. One stops me and asks if the icons on the desktop are physical drives or partitions. "It's a partition, son." As I try to walk away again he says, "Why not just make a folder?" Argh! I have no idea where he gets it.