Digital BW, The Print

Cleavis,

There is not a lot of advantage in putting your PS scratch disk on the same
hard disk as your program files, even if you have divided the disk into two
partitions C & D. In fact there might be a disadvantage in putting it on D
since it will be written each time you use PS after whatever other data you
have on D, which means it will be at the slower inner part of the hard disk.
If your C partition has plenty of spare space (PS temp files are multiples
of 2GB) and you defrag it frequently (so that there is always at least 2GB
of continuous free space), it will probably work faster on C since it is
nearer the perimeter of your hard disk, nearer the swap/page file, and
nearer the program files, which all means the disk heads will get to it
quicker.

What you should do if you really want to speed things up is to put your PS
scratch file on a separate disk, in a partition of its own about 5GB (allows
for 2 PS temp files). Then the heads on the second disk can be
reading/writing to the PS temp files at the same time as the heads on the
other disk are reading/writing the program files or swap files.

Even better is to have a third hard disk with a dedicated partition onto
which you put your Windows swap/page file, so the program files, swap file,
and scratch disk can all be read and/or written at the same time!!

The fastest setup I have found is my current one:- I have two fast disks
linked in a RAID 0 (onboard on my MSI motherboard) as my C: drive, which is
so fast that I now have put back my PS scratch disk onto that disk as a
dedicated D: partition immediately next to the C partition and before the E
partition in which I keep my data files. I still keep my Windows scratch
file on a separate non-raid disk in its own partition F:, with a second
partition G: in which I keep copies of my data files from E: in case the
RAID setup goes haywire.

Other people have used a SCSI disk as their PS scratch disk, but they tend
to be expensive, and not much faster these days, if at all.

Bob Frost.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cleavis" <lyonscox@...>

> If I have a C & D drive...can I/how do I dedicate the D drive to
> photoshop as a swap file space?  Do I benefit from doing this?
>
> I can generally follow directions if there's a web site the walks one
> through it?