Photoshop Tutorials

Description

Hard Drives

{mosimage} Hard drives are the main storage device for computers. The time it takes to load and save a file greatly depends on the hard drives speed. Hard drives are especially important for Photoshop. If your typical Photoshop and image files are small, one hard drive is enough. However, if your files are large, there are several configurations that may help optimize your computer for Photoshop:

1. Install a separate hard drive for usage as a scratch disk. When your computer runs out of RAM, temporary files are stored on a scratch disk which also makes Photoshop slower.
2. Use a RAID 0 configuration. This setup uses two hard drives as one and requires two hard drives and a RAID controller.  By using two hard drives, the performance of the drives is greatly increased. However, keep in mind that if even one out of the two hard drives fails, you may lose all your data on that drive.  Therefore, we only recommend using RAID 0 as a scratch disk or for usage as the main system drive (without any important documents). There are also other configurations such as RAID 5 that uses at least one hard drive to backup the files. This ensures that if one of the drives fail, there will be a backup to recover from.

{mostip}Don't use an external hard drive as the scratch disk. They're slow and it's often better to use the system drive instead.{/mostip}