Why put PS Scratch file in its own partition?

Is the only reason to place the PS Scratch File in its own partition on a drive other than the OS drive, to prevent fragmentation? (Am getting ready to reload XP Pro and reconfigure drives and partitions)

MikeSp

You want PS scratch on a different physical drive then the OS page file so they do not compete for the disk Arm. Putting the PS swap in its own partition prevents it from being fragmented all over the drive. The biggest performance improvement is putting PS swap on a different physical drive then the OS page file. The OS will be paging PS because of its memory requirements. PS will be swapping parts of the the image you are working on because of the size of the data. Give each its own drive to swap on else one is stealing the disk are when the disk seeks to the page or swap files.
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JJMacke

i dont know, personally I find 90% of the performance recommendations so overrated. PS is a very, very simple program. when it has free ram, it screams along. when it runs out and has to use scratch, its frustratingly slow. case closed. what we all really need is a true 64 bit app, OS, and boatloads of ram to go round, instead of trying to bleed that last extra 1% performance. hopefully by sometime next year we'll have just that. until then, no matter where your scratch is, we're all realistically limited to somewhere around 2.5GB if you can get the 3gb switch working.

Also. If you are using a seperate drive for the PS Scratch and you are using IDE drives, then make sure the PS Scratch disk is not on the same IDE channel as the OS drive.
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Kevin
http://blog.kevinmillsphoto.com

I guess the best performance should be a seperated disk through another controller, withh a dedicated partition formatted in FAT.
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Marco from Luxembourg
http://webplaza.pt.lu/stacreiz