Yet Again... Location of Scratch Disk

[bob jared]

I have 2 hard drives, each w/ multiple partitions. On the first hard drive is the WinXP OS and in another partition on the first hard drive is where Photoshop is installed.

On the second hard drive in it's own partition is where the WinXP swapfile is located. I have enough room on the second drive to create a dedicated partition for PS's Scratch Disk, which obviously puts it on a seperate hard drive from PS but on the same hard drive as the Win swap file. Would this be helpful or self defeating ?

In other words, given a choice it can be located on the same drive as PS or the same drive as the Win swap file.

Thanks so much for any advice and hints.

Bob

[YrbkMgr]

Photo Help is right (as usual <grin>), but the one comment I would add is if you can put the scratch disk on a separate PHYSICAL drive (not a prartition), the theory is you'll get better performance.

There's no use to putting it on a separate partition of the same hard drive is the point.

But as Photo Help says, you won't notice any difference except in the most extreme of circumstances.

Peace,
Tony

[BLUDVLZ]

Just to add to the comments, I have heard that, when specifying scratch drives, it's best not to locate your primary scratch to the same drive/parition that contains your Windows swap file...

[Photo Help]

Thanks for the vote of confidence Tony but there are so many things to consider...

Like so many other things. Is it better to have a 2.6 GHz system than a 2.4 GHz system, of course but will any of us notice a difference worth spending an extra $50? Probably not.

Issues that come into play are...

Fragmentation

Speed\Bandwidth

Swap File and simultaneous Scratch disk access - Unlikely.

Memory - If you are writing to disk that much get more!!!

Wear & Tear - Do you want the drive where you save your master files to be worn down by constant swap and scratch access.

We all know the limitations of bandwidth, memory, drive speed, etc. Raids are great for writing data, bad for reading data.

Scratch disk configurations that work well for one person, may result in higher costs with no noticeable benefits for others.

The key is to use the scratch disk as little as possible. Once you are writing to disk you are already slowing yourself down considerably so a one or two percent speed difference will mean very little.