Another approach might be something like the Giga-Byte iRam device, which looks like a quite nice way to create a very high-speed scratch disk for photoshop.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Detai...px?NewsId=14213
That's fascinating, a return of expanded RAM we had in the good ole' days. But 8-bit 4.77 MHz (yes, less than 5 MB/s) is not anywhere near as fast as the potential 133 MB/s of PCI.
This is pretty useful, although fairly expensive.
I believe high speed storage for photoshop was the original intent as well, it would be interesting to see how much it would help in real use.
With support for 8 GB of memory, it's good enough that you can use that as your primary scratch disk for Photoshop and perhaps not need to use another scratch disk.
However, buying two of these may not be much of a performance enhancer, since they'll be sharing the PCI bus.
with about 4gb of ram on the system board, couldn't you just create a ramdisk(ramdrive) and place your scratch disk there or would that defeat the purpose?!Now I don;t know anymore
Yes, you could, and yes, it might help.
But with only 4 GB of RAM, you'd have to be satisfied with using a pretty small ramdisk, which wouldn't help a lot. It's better on a system board supporting 8 GB or more of RAM, then you can dedicate e.g. 4 GB to ramdisk and 4 GB to operating system and applications.
Also, the device from Gigabyte has battery backup, so you can actually store stuff there between reboots. That's very good.
The one thing that may partially defeat the performance of a ramdisk, though, is that Windows and other operating systems have built-in caching of disk data to RAM. But in general, it's faster anyway.