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Does using an external HD as scratch improve Photoshop performance?
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Join Date: May 2005
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I am hanging on for Santa Rosa next spring to upgrade my iMac, so am still getting by on my G4 800 (768 ram). It is a wonderful machine, but the poor thing does struggle a bit with complex Photoshop (CS) actions. I've just purchased an external HD which has room to spare, and I was wondering if I set it as the scratch disk, or alternatively, installed the app on it and ran it from there, it would speed things up a bit. Remember I only have Firewire 400 on this iMac. With Christmas coming, and cards etc to do, any speed improvement would help!
Thanks in advance.
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"Believe nothing, no matter where you heard it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
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Mac Elite
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Having a large, fast scratch disk for PS DOES help it's performance, but leave the app itself on the boot drive. Scratch disks MUST remain empty (& defragged) to be effective. Also maxxin da ram will help even more 
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Signatures are ugly. Bitchy women are ugly......YOU do the math :)
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Thanks for the advice. I've partitioned the (7200 rpm) ex hd, so have a 75GB virgin partition to do the scratch job! Unfortunately, on this model Apple, in their wisdom, made the original 256 MB ram chip inaccessible to the user, hence the 768 config I have now...
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"Believe nothing, no matter where you heard it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
Buddha
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Mac Elite
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bummer on da ram  PS does run better w/more. But fortunately, you can adjust the amount it uses in the preferences (ala OS 9), so give it 512mb and just try to not run any other big apps at the same time if you can
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Signatures are ugly. Bitchy women are ugly......YOU do the math :)
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bowwowman is right, more ram is better but you are stuck. As Photoshop does its magic it will write temporary data to ram, when it runs out of ram it will write to a scratch disk. If the System, Program and the scratch disk are all on one drive then the read/write process slows way down. The external drive will help.
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Bring on Santa Rosa! I was doing some big photoshop things last year, and applying 'swirl' filter to a large, complex gradient took 45 minutes to render! 2.6 whatever Core2Duo, 2, maybe even 4GB of ram, 10.5 - not to mention a 24" screen....drool is the appropriate word here I think!
In the meantime, I'll just scatch along... sorry!
Thanks guys!
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"Believe nothing, no matter where you heard it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
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Clinically Insane
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It doesn't strictly have to be an external drive, as long as it's not the same drive you're booting from (and preferably not the same one as the app is installed on). For example, you could use a second internal drive.
However, be warned that you aren't going to get all that much of a boost from this. The only thing it can speed up is reading things from or writing them out to the scratch files, and then only because the system doesn't have to wait for other tasks on the drive to write to them.
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You are in Soviet Russia. It is dark. Grue is likely to be eaten by YOU!
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From what I can recall from looking at benchmarks when the G5's first came out, Photoshop really hits its stride at about 2.5 GB of RAM, and peronal experience bears that out.
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When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift.
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Forum Regular
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Originally Posted by chris v 
From what I can recall from looking at benchmarks when the G5's first came out, Photoshop really hits its stride at about 2.5 GB of RAM, and peronal experience bears that out.
Interesting. So if you allow 1 gig for Rosetta, and need 2.5 gig for optimum Photoshop... Let's hope Santa Rosa allows for 4 gig in the iMac!
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"Believe nothing, no matter where you heard it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."
Buddha
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