Hi Alastair, I would increase your RAM for a start, more RAM helps speed things up, 8GB is good ;-)
PS & PS Elements use 'scratch disk'. If you had another internal drive on your computer you could designate a separate disk as the scratch disk. Your scratch disk needs to be as fast as the drive PS or PS Elements is installed on or there's no point in setting up a special scratch disk. If you had a USB External Drive, for example, forget it ---- USB isn't fast enough, even USB 2.0, so leave your main drive as your scratch disk. A Firewire 800 External Drive would be fast enough I would imagine, but perhaps not a Firewire 400 because the transfer limitations don't allow much performance improvement. I can perhaps see a problem with using an external drive, if say PS crashed while writing to the 'scratch disk' … hmmm, I would need to do some research on this before I could comment further. Cheers, Ronni On 16/11/2010, at 11:53 AM, mince and pud wrote: > > Hi Ronni / Severin > > Interested in your photoshop and disc space discussion. I have also read that > PS likes a separate disc for a scratch disc - any idea if this makes a > significant difference? I was considering getting an extra drive but it would > be disappointing if I didn't see a benefit/ > > best > alastair > > 105gb free and diminishing.... > > > > powermac G5 > dual 2ghz > 3.5g ram > 10.5.8 > > iMac > 2.1ghz > 2.5mb > 10.5.8 > > > > > On 16/11/2010, at 3:23 AM, Severin Crisp wrote: > >> >> Ronni, >> thanks, as always, for your perceptive and valuable summing up comments >> on this one. >> After Mail and Safari my main work is with Photoshop, Word, iPhoto, iMovie, >> Mpegstreamclip, CinematizePro and FinalCut Express(learning!) so there is >> lots of call for extra scratch space and the like. I have been aware of a >> perceptible but difficult to quantify slow down in recent times. My 300GB >> internal boot disk now has 80GB "free", slowly diminishing, and I have been >> looking to a bigger one anyway, as well as a possible increase from my 3GB >> RAM. Hiving off stuff to an external drive, of which I have several, is >> feasible but clumsy, and disk GBs are no longer seriously expensive. >> No, I would not consider a 5400rpm drive! >> Enjoy this lovely sunny day! >> Severin >> >> On 16/11/2010, at 10:15 AM, Ronda Brown wrote: >> >>> >>> Hi Severin, >>> >>> The bigger the Hard Drive the better, also a 7200-rpm preferred to a >>> 5400-rpm. I would like a 1TB or 2TB Hard Drive in my MacBook Pro ;-) >>> I get really worried if a 500GB Hard Drive gets to 100GB Available Space, I >>> like more than 30% Available Space. >>> >>> If you run Photoshop it is best to have 100GB of free space. If all you >>> were doing is Microsoft Word and email, I would keep a minimum of 50 GB >>> free unused space available, this allows the operating system vital unused >>> space to write its swap files, virtual memory scratch disk. >>> >>> Full hard drives also tend to fragment system and data files and greatly >>> slow disk access down, too. >>> >>> Left unchecked, the problem will likely spread and corrupt the entire >>> install until the hard drive literally won't mount or the computer won't >>> boot or run without constant crashing. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> Ronni >>> >>> 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core i7 >>> 2.66GHz / 8GB / 1067 MHz DDR3 / 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200rpm >>> >>> OS X 10.6.4 Snow Leopard >>> Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) >>> On 16/11/2010, at 9:36 AM, Severin Crisp wrote: >>> >>>> >>>> Thanks to Ronni, Daniel, Robert and others for useful input on this one. >>>> For the moment I have trashed the various preferences and will assess the >>>> outcome in due course. Robert's piece on "real" drive free space and >>>> speed is intriguing and obvious when you think about it. In any case I >>>> may update to a bigger boot drive accompanied by a general cleanup. >>>> Enjoy the sunny day! >>>> Severin >>>> >>>> >>>> ________________________________________________________ >>>> Assoc Professor R Severin Crisp, FIP, CPhys, FAIP >>>> 15 Thomas St, Mount Clarence, Albany, 6330, Western Australia. >>>> Phone (08) 9842 1950 (Int'l +61 8 9842 1950) >>>> email mailto:sevcr...@westnet.com.au >>>> ________________________________________________________ -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
