scratch disk

[csprophoto]

Evening Brian, I tried to ask this on the FB group but Damien slapped me upside the head for breaking Rule 1 and said to ask it here. So, let me preface it with the fact that i just finish a new pc build for christmas. Specs are

I9, rtx3090, 64gb ddr5, 1tb PCIE Gen4 boot drive, 1tb 7200 spinner and 2tb 7200 spinner's to be used as storage drives and a 500gb pcie gen 4 scratch disk drive.

My question, the scratch drive is to be used only for Photoshop as a scratch disk and nothing else pc related. Is it beneficial to also swap my Bridge and CameraRAW cache locations over to this drive too? I get how frequent fragmenting from PS could cause issues on the boot drive overtime but wasnt sure if its also beneficial to have Bridge and CR use the same disk as their own scratch drive of sorts.

Thanks for the help!

Edited December 28, 2022 by csprophoto

[csprophoto]

I forgot to add, its running a very debloated windows 11. I didnt want to run 11, but once i found some good debloat tools and could strip 11 down to its essentials, it made more sense for the long run and so far im liking it.

[Brian]

On 12/28/2022 at 6:19 PM, csprophoto said:

Is it beneficial to also swap my Bridge and CameraRAW cache locations over to this drive too? I get how frequent fragmenting from PS could cause issues on the boot drive overtime but wasnt sure if its also beneficial to have Bridge and CR use the same disk as their own scratch drive of sorts.

Maybe. Not really. Clear as mud?

Honestly, I'm more concerned about the 500GBs than you moving the scratch disk over. One thing you do not do, and this isn't insulting your intelligence...not by any means, is NEVER-EVER-EVER-EVER DEFRAG A FLASH BASED MEDIA DRIVE. LIKE EVER. Fragmentation is a word that needs to be stripped from your vocabulary when regarding SSD, m.2 Drives and the like. Worrying about Fragmentation is for the Spinning HDs, and in reality...it's not THAT much of a huge deal as it's made out to be. (You get maybe a 1% performance boost on a de-fragmented spinning HD. Maybe 2% on a good day.)

The reason you would move the Scratch Disk is for the reasons you mentioned, but also not having to deal with the space error messages if the main drive gets full. So I'd move things over and see what happens. At the very worst, it complains and you move things back. Personally, I'd just move the PS Scratch Disk over and let it have that 500GBs all to itself. Leave the other stuff alone. A 1TB Main Drive is perfectly fine in today's computers and there is enough room for things to breathe, especially for the Windows "Scratch Disk," called Pagefile.sys. (Back in the Windows 3.1 days and Windows 95 days, this Pagefile.sys was referred to as the Windows Swap File. This was a term from the 1970's, when UNIX was all-the-rage. Same difference, it's a cache file, regardless of OS or Program.)

Since you have a 1TB Main Drive, you don't need to be hyper-anal about things as you would if you had say...a 128GB Main Drive in a stupid laptop. THAT'S when you really start worrying about this stuff.

[csprophoto]

I get that. Defragmenting kills the life of a flash based drive due to excess writes that arent technically needed. As for Bridge and CR, I may experiment with them and put them on the same drive and watch for any performance losses. I get pagefile too, Im not as well versed as you are but at one point I wanted to do Networking for a living and completed my MCSE and CCNP in 2003, then I decided it was more fun to travel the country buying and selling wholesale cars and trucks (which was an absolute blast). Ive always stuck around computers since then as a side, side hobby. Thanks for the help!

[Brian]

Oh good. Someone who "knows" stuff. I always have to be careful, not for the member whom I'm responding to, but the person a year from now that comes across this thread.

Try moving stuff and see what happens. You can always move it back. Honestly? I think you will be fine moving all of Adobe's Cache Files over to that 500GB Drive. Leave the Windows Swap File alone for now.