Disk or Partition for Photoshop 7

[type0]

Hello.

I was wondering if there is any significant performance difference having a scratch disk on a seperate disk or a partition?

I have a new 80GB HD and wanted to know if partitioning would be satisfactory or should I purchase a seperate hard drive?

If I do partition, how much space should I allocate?
If I purchase, how large of a drive do I need?

Thank you,

[seanf]

Just create a new partition for Photoshop that's at least 150mb (approx install size) and you'll be fine. If you just want Photoshop on that partition and you're not going to save any files there I would make it about 1gb

Sean

[type0]

Just create a new partition for Photoshop that's at least 150mb (approx install size) and you'll be fine. If you just want Photoshop on that partition and you're not going to save any files there I would make it about 1gb

Sean

Thank you Sean. I will not be adding any files to the partition. It is only for the scratch disk.

[ChrisRoss]

Just create a new partition for Photoshop that's at least 150mb (approx install size) and you'll be fine. If you just want Photoshop on that partition and you're not going to save any files there I would make it about 1gb

Sean

Actually you don't want anything on that partition not even Photoshop. Depending on the size of the files you work with would depend on the size of the partition. And a partition is fine you don't need a separate drive. The only benefit I can think of using another drive would be if your current drive is only 5400rpm you could get a faster drive and you will also see a performance increase as well.

[redux]

i second iwin's suggestion of not having anything on that partition. a little clarification: no matter how much RAM you have, and how much virtual memory windows is using, photoshop will always use scratch disk space to keep the image(s) you're currently working on on disk (and, if i'm not mistaken, it keeps them in a raw, uncompressed format as well). so, the size of the partition you would want is related to the biggest image file you'd want to work with * compression factor. unless you're doing insanely high resolution/size print images, or plan on having a huge ammount of images open at the same time, you will get away with having a partition of a few hundred megabytes...say a ballpark figure of 500+ Mb.
the benefit of having it on a separate partition is that you don't have to worry about how fragmented your disk is. the partition should be used exclusively for photoshop's scratch files, and photoshop tidies up behind itself (unless it crashes, where it would then leave behind a tmp file that you can remove)...so your scratch file will always be contiguous, which is a good thing(tm).
as iwin said, the only advantage of having a completely dedicated, separate drive would be if your current disk is slow.

additionally, i'd say that both methods (new partition or new disk) should only be considered if you're really planning on doing a LOT of huge photoshop work...it's overkill for anything else (heck, i use it quite heavily for A3 sized print graphics at 300dpi, and don't have a separate scratch partition)

[type0]

Thank you for all of your insight and suggestions. I will create a seperate partition and not put anything else on it. I was considering about 5GB. (I have an 80GB drive) Right now Photoshop 6.0 is always freezing on me (Pentium 450, 256MB RAM), so a seperate partition for a scratch file will be very helpful on my new system (2.08GHZ, 333 Bus, 512 RAM and a 7200, 8MB Buffer Hard Drive).

Thanks again. I can't wait to load Photoshop 7!

[ChrisRoss]

Thank you for all of your insight and suggestions. I will create a seperate partition and not put anything else on it. I was considering about 5GB. (I have an 80GB drive) Right now Photoshop 6.0 is always freezing on me (Pentium 450, 256MB RAM), so a seperate partition for a scratch file will be very helpful on my new system (2.08GHZ, 333 Bus, 512 RAM and a 7200, 8MB Buffer Hard Drive).

Thanks again. I can't wait to load Photoshop 7!

If you haven't yet, update to 6.0.1

[redux]

i'm sure the freezing of photoshop is mostly due to the slow processor...you should be fine on your new system even without the scratch partition...but yeh, it won't do any harm either...

[ChrisRoss]

i'm sure the freezing of photoshop is mostly due to the slow processor...you should be fine on your new system even without the scratch partition...but yeh, it won't do any harm either...

A 450 is not that slow, unless your working on huge files Photoshop just doesn't freeze. 256MB Ram would be more of a problem then the processor, but I have seen slower system fuction just fine with all versions of Photoshop. Now if your running XP on the machine with only 256MB then I'm sure thats the problem.