Hard Drive

[latingirl]

I have MX Studio (flash,dreamweaver,fireworks,freehand) on my computer. Plus, Office and Windows XP, plus Photoshop, plus a ton of CD's recorded through WMedia Player, plus a bunch of misc stuff. I have a 20 gig Hard Drive. Should I upgrade? Can I just buy a 2nd external harddrive? Should I partition?

[DoPeY5007]

you can get a second internal for files, or an external, it all depends on what you want. External will cost more as well

[Tico]

The only real advantage of an external drive is portability. If you don't need portability I reccomend getting a new drive, ghosting your current drive to it and then using the 20 giger for just music or something like that.

A second HD like the 120 GB 7200 8MB dell special could also help system performance since you do a lot of adobe stuff....

[Ladogaboy]

Originally posted by chosenfool
i used to think 20GB is huge, but after all the downloads, and the programs ive installed, i wont recommend installing less than 40GB, especially that broadband is popular now. those downloads...

yeah, get a second internal hard drive. port ALL your data and files to that drive, and use the 20GB drive exclusively for your OS. that way, if you decide to reinstall the OS, you wont have to worry about accidentally reformatting even your raw data - its safe on the other drive.

how big a drive you want is up to you - theyre getting really cheap now. 3 years ago i got a 20GB drive for $160. now for much less you can get a 120GB drive instead. sheesh, what a waste of money if i think about it...

If you are going to just use a second drive for storage, I'd recommend just getting a large 5,400 rpm drive. I think Fry's is having a sale on the 120 WD 54Krpm for $108 I think...

That should be more than enough storage space for you.

[Hiro]

I prefer personally to use the smaller drive as the system drive (Windows, Programs, etc) and my secondary 60 gig drive for Music, Data, Documents, etc. So that way I can format my System drive without losing ANY of my important data.

[ribitch]

I believe that the drive should be a 7200 rpm not a 5400 rpm. The xtra speed makes a big performance increase. You could use the 20 GB drive as photoshops scratch drive and use the larger drive for everything else. That way your main OS isnt fragmented from photoshop, and you have plenty of scratch disk space.

[latingirl]

Thanks thats good advice.

Just one question. I don't think I have any room for a 2nd internal hard drive. Will it make a difference if the 2nd larger drive is external?

Also, what's a scratch drive or scratch disk space?

[ribitch]

Originally posted by latingirl
Thanks thats good advice.

Just one question. I don't think I have any room for a 2nd internal hard drive. Will it make a difference if the 2nd larger drive is external?

Also, what's a scratch drive or scratch disk space?

definition

Scratch disks
If you have ever seen the message "Could not complete your request because the primary scratch disk is full", you'll know how frustrating Photoshop can be when it gets low on operating space.

First of all, what's a "scratch disk"? Photoshop can work with some very large files - high resolution scans can head towards 25Mb-100Mb each. It therefore needs to be able to handle the memory requirements of these files if there are several open at once, or when you want to be able to undo a whole series of steps. To cope with the likely situation that there will not be enough available RAM to hold the images, Photoshop goes direct to the hard disk to use it as overflow space, bypassing the operating system. Although both the Mac OS and Windows also use so-called "virtual memory" in ordinary operation, Photoshop likes to do its own thing, mainly for performance reasons. This is the "scratch disk" - overflow space for Photoshop, and you can allocate up to four disk drives for the purpose. However, there are a few rules to observe.

Scratch disks must be fixed physical hard drives or partitions - no network drives or removable drives - Jaz, Zips or CD-RW - can be used.
You should allocate your largest, emptiest, fastest hard drive as the "primary" scratch disk - the others won't get used until this one fills up.
Keep your primary scratch disk fairly empty if you can, and certainly keep it well defragmented and free from errors - use a disk checking program such as Windows' ScanDisk.
If the primary scratch disk fills up, you will have problems - hence the dreaded error message: "Could not complete your request because the primary scratch disk is full". This is often a Catch-22 - you will not be able to close the file because there is not enough temporary space, and unless you can delete something else from the drive you can't find enough space to save the file. You need to make sure that your primary scratch disk has free space equivalent to around five times your largest file and preferably equal to around twice the amount of RAM fitted in your computer.
Why twice the RAM? A little-known fact is that when Photoshop starts up it checks the available scratch disk space. If it can only find (say) 36Mb of scratch space, it will only use 36Mb of RAM, regardless of what you may have set in your preferences (see above). So if you are low on primary scratch disk space not only will you have trouble because of a lack of space for temporary files, but Photoshop will be using less real RAM to start with, making it more likely that it will need to use the scracth disk! So keep your scratch dirve empty and performance will be maintained.
If you can, buy an extra hard disk and use it exclusively for Photoshop. It sounds like overkill, but big hard drives are cheap (under £100 UK or $140 for 20Gb), and both Photoshop and your other programs will run much better.

the larger drive can be external. I dont know if windows can boot off an external drive though. You would want to buy a USB2.0 card and drive or a firewire card and drive to obtain a decent speed.

[Ladogaboy]

Originally posted by ribitch
I believe that the drive should be a 7200 rpm not a 5400 rpm. The xtra speed makes a big performance increase.

If you are using the drive just for storage, the extra speed isn't worth the price, imo.

[ribitch]

i would use the larger drive for the system.storage and the smaller drive for scratch. If that were the case, 7200 RPM would be best. I prefer to keep all my drives 7200 RPM just because it offers the best performance.

[latingirl]

Lots of useful info. Thanks guys.