Photoshop temp files

[eric]

For a long time now I have kept an empty partition on my hard disc for Photoshop to use as a scratch disc. The size, since I last played with Partition Magic, is 1.9 Gb. Today I was fooling around with a picture, 34.7 Mb according to Photoshop when I decided to open a previous version to see whether I was making it better or worse. PS told me that it could not open the next file as my scratch disc was full. I have never got this message before so decided to investigate. PS was not kidding, but it had created a 1.85 Gb temporary file. This made me want to do more checking, so I closed the file in PS and checked scratch disc usage again. This time 147,420 bytes with nothing open in PS. I opened one of the 34.7 Mb files and the temp file on the scratch disc went up to 384,540, opened another 34.7 Mb file and with the two of them open the scratch disc still read 384,540. One of my friends recently had a similar experience, except PS had made two temp files each of 15Gb and had not deleted them when closed. My friend wondered where his disc space had gone. I fired up Partition Magic and gave PS 20Gb as a scratch disc, that should fix it. Both of us are using CS on Win XP machines with 1Gb of RAM. Anybody else had similar experiences?

[Swampy]

I've had temp files as large as 200mb, but that's about it. Once in a while the file doesn't get deleted and I have to delete it myself. Haven't seen the problem as bad as yours though.

As for your partition. If it's on the same physical drive as your "C drive", it's not doing you any good except for ease of checking on the scratch space.

In fact, if it is on the same physical drive as your C drive partition, you are probably slowing yourself down as you're accessing 2 logical drives on the same hard drive making the drive work more than twice as hard whenever it needs to access things on both partitions at the same time, IE: Windows swap file and PS scratch area.

[Brad Harris]

I had a old 25G 7200 Rpm drive that I installed just for Photoshop's scratch disk only. Really improved the performance of my computer since I only
have 512 mb of ram installed.You really want to seperate it from your main
drive that has your operating system on it.

Brad

[sandman]

I installed a seperate 160gb H/D just for images (in case of computer failure) and i transfered my scratch disc to that , i've had a few going up to around 350mb , and on one occasion i had 3 showing up ,all over 150mb , i just delete them if they don't delete themselves after a while .
Can't say if it improves the performance as i've got 2gb of memory installed , but i can open some huge P.S files , like big panormas very quickly , something that my old 512mb computer used to struggle over . (if not seize up completely).

Brian