There are no benefits (speed or otherwise) to having multiple partitions on the same physical drive. The drives holding PS' scratch file and Windows' swap file should both be separate physical drives, preferably different than your data drives. The reason I asked about disk activity is because it indicates that Windows or PS is finding it necessary to dump stuff in RAM to disk to make room for whatever you're doing--in this case opening files in ACR.
My PhotoShop scratch drive is used only by PS when its running, or when Autopano pro is running, I only run one or the other, never both at the same time. This made a big difference with APP temp files.
The Windows page file that's on the 12GB partition, is this better than just leaving it on my C: drive? I also have it set to "Let System Manage size"
The reason that I have 3 partitions, well, the first one is the 12 GB for Windows page, the second one for new files, and the third for all of my old files from a older smaller HD that I filled up, and I just wanted to keep them separate from each other.
I assumed that making the 12 GB partition for the page file was better than leaving on the C: drive. I do know the the PS scratch drive should be a stand alone drive so I didn't want to partition that. I have room for one more HD, could buy another HD just for the page file.
Please let me know if there's a better way than what I'm already doing.