Need Help Setting Up Scratch Disk for CS5

[Gregs]

I’m running CS5 on a laptop with 2 hard disk drives: Primary drive is a 160  GB solid state drive which already has OS and programs. Just added a second 7200 500 GB drive for data etc. Questions: 1) Should scratch disk go on the solid state drive or can it go on the second 500 GB drive? Any real world difference/advantage? 2) Should the scratch disk be in a separate partition? If so, what would be optimal (minimal?)size for dedicated scratch disk ? 3) If scratch disk goes on the solid state drive, would I have to completely re-format (and re-install OS etc.) it to create a new, dedicated partition?  Running Win 7 with 6 GB RAM. Largest files are 200 MB medium format scans. Thanks.

[digitaldog]

Ideally you want the scratch disk to be the fastest drive you can throw at the task. Keep in mind that the idea here is to offset the use of Ram which is measured in nanoseconds, vs. hard drives in miliseconds which gives you an idea of how much faster RAM is and why you want the fastest scratch disk possible (and as large as possible).

[Gregs]

Not sure how much faster an SSD is than regular HD for large file read/writes as opposed to shorter amounts of data where it clearly excels. Also, I'm assuming that the scratch disk needs a separate, didicated partition - is that true???

[digitaldog]

I would suspect SSD is faster and no, I don’t see the point of a partition for this use.

[Daan]

I would say add as much RAM as you can afford. For instance 32 GB.