Photoshop scratch disk
A friend of mine is intrigued by the 10,000 RPM Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor hard drives, which offer blazing seek times and fast data transfer rates, the idea being that using a RAID pair of such drives would make an excellent Photoshop scratch disk. I’ve now researched this (including instrumenting and testing Photoshop’s behavior, creating a test suite, etc), and I’ve discovered some very useful and actionable information, which I’ll be sharing in detail in a future report. A few brief pointers however—
1) Notebook users (MacBook Pro) will never achieve the performance possible from a desktop machine (eg Mac Pro). This is due to both memory limitations as well as no ability to achieve more than humdrum disk speed, even using an SATA adapter in the Express Card slot. All is not lost however, there are some real improvements to be made.
2) Striped RAID helps tremendously over a single drive. Two drives works great, more are better. I’ll have data on how many in my full report. Mac Pro users have lots of possibilities here.
3) Recent high-capacity drives offer far higher performance than the fastest models of just one or two years ago. Choose these for your scratch disk partition.
I have much more detail to share, but that’s it for now.
