Firewire drive as scratch disc

[Myles Redding]

I have a firewire drive that I use just for rendering and such its fast and it stays empty unless something is being built. Whenever I setup PS 7 to use it as a scratch disc it crashes when the pgm is restarted causing me to delete the setup file to get back into PS. has anyone experienced this? more importantly does anyone have a solution?

[Helen Polson]

Is this an external drive plugged in the Firewire port, yes? As far as I'm aware the scratch disk can't be set to an external/plugged in drive. Can anyone confirm this?

[Madsen]

Helen Polson wrote:

> As far as I'm aware the scratch disk can't be set to an
> external/plugged in drive. Can anyone confirm this?

I have a Maxtor 5000XT
<http://www.maxtor.com/en/documentation/data_sheets/personal_storage_5000xt_data_sheet.pdf>
- connected via USB2 and can assign Photoshops scratch disk to
that drive without any problems whatsoever (PS 6.01 and 7.01).

Until a few months ago it was connected to a firewire port and
that didn't make any difference. Photoshop could still use it
as a scratch disk drive (I'm using WinXP Pro SP1).

--
Regards
Madsen.

[Pierre Courtejoie]

Helen, you ar almost right! in fact, it is a matter of drivers and how the HD is seen by Windows: Photoshop won't accept removable disks as Scratch partition.

[Brian Corder]

there are two options for removeable hard drives in XP. One is optimize for performance and the other is for portability. Change your settings so that it is for performance and that may help your issue.

A couple of other suggestions, make sure that the hard drive is the first device or only device on that port of your firewire card. i have a Nikon SlideScanner, DV Cam and a few other devices on the card and occasionally it gets picky as to what order they are in.

Just a couple of thoughts

[Myles Redding]

Thanks for the help everybody FYI firewire drives in XP Pro only come up as hard drives reguardless the portablility or performance setting. the key is as mentioned by Brian placement in the chain. I have 4 fw drives of course my build drive is the last one on the chain but PS will let me use the 1st one on the chain as the scratch but none other fortunately my video sftwre doesnt care