How much CS2 scratch disk do you use?

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Heliocentrical

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I'm looking to get an idea of what size scratch disk you have partitioned on your second drive for CS2? Is there really that much of an improvement over having it on your main drive?
 
Aratech said:
I'm looking to get an idea of what size scratch disk you have partitioned on your second drive for CS2? Is there really that much of an improvement over having it on your main drive?
Click to expand...

What are you talking about?
 
I'd put it on whatever the fastest drive you have is. I have multiple scratch disks set up on multiple drives.
 
dBTelos said:
What are you talking about?
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I'm asking what size partiton I should allocate on my second hardrive for CS2 to use as scratch disk? The second disk is used only for backups right now and I want to partition a portion of it specifically for that purpose.

MJCfromCT said:
I'd put it on whatever the fastest drive you have is. I have multiple scratch disks set up on multiple drives.
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So what size should the partition be?
 
Aratech, are you talking about Photoshop?



Nevermind, you probably are.

For Premiere Pro, I use a 40gb HDD that I had sitting around. Granted, I edit HD video, but there was definately an improvement.

I assume the partition should be no more than, I dunno, 6gb in photoshop?
 
Aratech said:
So what size should the partition be?
Click to expand...

I don't have a dedicated partition to my photoshop scratch disk, but you certainly can if you want. Depending on how frequently you use photoshop, and how "intense" the stuff you photoshop is, I'd say 6-10gb would be more than plenty.
 
I just bought a single 120 GB SATA drive that I use for all Temporary Data.

That means CS2 Scratch
Sony Vegas Scratch
Temporary Internet Files
Pagefile
etc.... Seems to work very well for me.
 
Since it does not give specific sizes - I have it set to use 4 drives with my OS drive as the last in the list and the drive with the Windows page file second from last. Also have it set to use up to 80% of available RAM on that tab.
 
Well I installed the new drive and created a 20 gig partition and assigned it a the scratch disk in both Illustrator and Photoshop CS2. It seems to speed things up a bit but it didnt solve my initial problem.

I'm trying to use gap detection in Live Paint to paint a detailed drawing of a tree (6.83 MB) that I scanned into illustrator. Whenever I try to run gap detection it just runs forever and eventually says "Not responding". I thought it was becasue I had too little ram so I added the seperate HD to use as a dedicated scratch disk.

Here are the systems specs:

3.2ghz
512mb DDR400
DVD/CDRW Combo Drive
160gb primary hard drive
80gb secondary hard drive (Partitoned - 20gb scratch disk/60gb backups)
Onboard Video, Sound & NIC
 
Well - you still have too little RAM to be working with drawings with potentially tens of thosands of vectors. A 6.3mb Illustrator file is huge unless it has a placed image in it. If it's pure vector then that file has a whole shit ton of vector points and Illustrator is going to be slow to respond to just about any change while it redraws or analyses all of those vectors. Illustrator is sensitive when you are working with files that have literally tons (many thousands) of points and can be very slow to respond when you have everything selected at once and are trying to do something such as live paint gap detection or transformations. Take a file with many thousands of points, select it all and try adding a drop shadow or something - that will bring many computers to their knees in a big hurry... I work in Illustrator and Photoshop daily for a living and even with 4gb of ram and dual 3.2 xeon processors I still run into situation like that at times.
 
I put it on my spare drive and let it use what it wants out of the free space.
 
MixManSC said:
Well - you still have too little RAM to be working with drawings with potentially tens of thosands of vectors. A 6.3mb Illustrator file is huge unless it has a placed image in it. If it's pure vector then that file has a whole shit ton of vector points and Illustrator is going to be slow to respond to just about any change while it redraws or analyses all of those vectors. Illustrator is sensitive when you are working with files that have literally tons (many thousands) of points and can be very slow to respond when you have everything selected at once and are trying to do something such as live paint gap detection or transformations. Take a file with many thousands of points, select it all and try adding a drop shadow or something - that will bring many computers to their knees in a big hurry... I work in Illustrator and Photoshop daily for a living and even with 4gb of ram and dual 3.2 xeon processors I still run into situation like that at times.
Click to expand...

Thanks for all the info. I replaced the 512mb Infineon ram with 1gig (2x512mb) of Corsair XMS Platinum. I then set all the recomended optimizations listed on adobe.com including disabling startup programs, swap file - twice the size of installed ram ect. It seems like its running much faster.In fact... I'd say it almost feels twice as fast.

So I go to use live paint and I'm actually able to complete the small gap detection without a problem unlike before where it would just hang. After succeeding at that I selected "close gaps with paths". The progress bar was about halfway when it crashed with the error " Not enough ram (memory)". I have no choice but to click okay and exit.

Well, at least I got farther than last time. :p

Anymore pointers? 2 gigs of ram maybe? If so, can it be value ram? I cant afford 2gigs of XMS right now.
 
Any kind of RAM will work fine for this sort of work....... I like high performance as much as the next guy here but when it comes to working with large amounts of data for important things related to my business I take a slightly different approach than the general PC enthusiast crowd. On my graphics workstation here at my shop it is still high performance but shifted over to workstation and server class hardware. For example all hard drives are U320 SCSI RAID 5 sets on a hardware RAID controller, dual Xeon processors, all of the RAM (4gb) is ECC - it's a bitch to be waiting 40 minutes on a 3gig file to process only to have some stray byte or whatever in your ram crap on it for you. ECC can help avoid things like that. It does give a slight performance penalty for the error checking and there is also a cost premium but worth it in my opinion. Granted - your system would also have to support ECC ram as well. I would think 1GB or RAM would be plenty for what you are doing but then again I do not use live paint a whole lot so I'm not 100% sure of how it taxes a system. I do know that when you are performing and operation on a huge amount of vectors all at the same time that can tax a system pretty hard though.

I'd also make sure you have the latest updates for Illustator as the initial CS2 ver 12 did have some bugs. Also Live Paint is a brand new tool and it may still be a bit buggy - I've had a few issues at times with Live Trace just crashing Illustrator back to the desktop losing my work... Lastly really get the system down to it's core essentials when are are trying to work with the file like this. Not just disabling startup items but shut down your virus scanner. If all else fails - throw money at the problem - does not necessarily fix the problem but often lets you overcome it and worst case is you will have plenty of RAM for the future when you are ready to upgrade to Vista or whatever... :D
 
PS scratch disk can be a monster, so I use a 200gb HDD for all my apps. When the project is done, it's burned to DVD, or the client gives me a HDD to mail it back on.
 
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