I am currently running CS3 on XP and will soon be running Vista 64 on a new computer. Possibly upgrading to CS4. What should the size of the scratch disk be? Should I have more than one? Can they be on the same drive? In seperate partitions? On CS3? CS4? Thanks in advance.
John
Scratch disk should be big enough to accommodate the largest file you ever plan to edit or the total number of files at one time you intend to edit. Err on the side of larger rather than smaller. I use 32GB for scratch disk partition size, might be smaller than others use.
One scratch disk is fine.
Your scratch disk should be on a separate hard drive from your operating system and the associated Windows virtual memory paging file.
The scratch disk benefits from having its own partition on the drive, helps avoid the issue of fragmentation.
Put your scratch disk on the very first partition on the drive, that is the fastest part of the drive.
Scratch disk is a speed bottleneck for Photoshop, the faster the scratch disk the faster Photoshop will be when using scratch disk. A big drive will generally be faster than a little drive. A fast single drive is good, a pair of drives in a RAID 0 array is faster still.
