> > On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 20:46:04 -0500 (EST), John Francis wrote: > > > > On Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:22:29 -0500 (EST), John Francis wrote: > > > > > > > If you have to swap to disk, then putting the Photoshop scratch > > > > space on a different physical drive [...] > > > > > > Different than what? The one that PS is installed on? The one the OS > > > is installed on? The one that the photo is stored on? > > > > Ideally, different from all the above - I've know people use a > > dedicated drive just as a photoshop swap device. > > > > Basically you don't want the disk heads to have to [move] ... > > Oh, I understand that, but let's look at it realistically. I've got my > OS on one drive. My swap file on another drive (don't want it on the > same drive as the OS). Photoshop on another (don't want, well, > anything on the OS and swap drives). Photoshop scratch space on > another (like you were saying). And my photo storage on another. > That's five physical drives. AFAIK, you can't even do it with regular > old IDE (or -66 or -100). You have to have SCSI or Serial ATA or > something. For me, it might happen. I'm a computer geek. For most > people it won't.
For a four-physical-drive setup, I'd suggest: o One drive for OS and software (read once at process startup) o One drive for OS swap file (and data backups, etc.) o One dedicated for photoshop scratch space o One (large) drive for image storage. Sharing one drive for the OS and software installations isn't going to be a problem; anything there will only get touched once. In fact I'd even consider putting the photoshop scratch space on the same physical drive (although on a separate partition) if pushed. The usage patterns don't overlap all that much; the OS/Software gets read at process initialisation time, and the photoshop scratch space is only used once you've got everything started up and have read in some image files. Put the OS swap file & the photoshop scratch disk on separate disk controllers, though. That way you can overlap I/O transfers.
