Scratch Disk questions!

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dauntlessds

dauntlessds

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Feb 17, 2012
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I just got my new 2TB WD Caviar Black drive and installed. The drive it is to replace is an old 500GB WD Green Drive 5100RPM crap. I ghosted the old drive to the new and was thinking the green drive could serve as a backup for the backup. Now I use Photoshop and Illustrator a LOT and also want to learn video editing so my question is. So my setup goes like this:
•Samsung 60GB 830 SSD (Main/OS/1 Game Installed/Adobe Products)
•WD 2TB Caviar Black (Secondary Drive/Virtual Memory/All other installs/ Steam)
•500GB WD Green (Blank/Formatted)
•500GB WD Green (Backups)

Should I set my virtual memory to the 2TB and Adobe Scratch Disks to the 500GB Blank one?
 
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Whats the point of SSD if you do not put scratch file on it?
Your apps will start fast but working with them will be as same as with normal magnetic drives as your scratch is on magnetic drive.
Also 60Gb SSD is too small for new OS's, buy at least 120Gb or more.

You should do next if you want to optimize your system for working with SSD drive:
  • ■ Use Windows 7 (8), it automatically switches off a lot of disk write functions for SSD drives, like last access time and similar (and you don't care about it). Google to see what else you might switch off to ensure long life of SSD drive.
    ■ Buy a lot of memory (32GB) so that all programs can work normally.
    ■ Buy UPS to do not have power failures while writing something on disk.
    ■ And...
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dauntlessds

dauntlessds

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Feb 17, 2012
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I have a feeling that you are trolling me. The scratch disk and paging file cannot go on the SSD. It is not an option. It is not a good idea to put scratch data and paging on an SSD because it is limited to so many writes before the cells are used up. I know it would be faster that way but I've read various things that keep pointing to Don't have scratch data for photoshop on the same drive as your operating system's page file.
 
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solarangel

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Dec 3, 2012
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Whats the point of SSD if you do not put scratch file on it?
Your apps will start fast but working with them will be as same as with normal magnetic drives as your scratch is on magnetic drive.
Also 60Gb SSD is too small for new OS's, buy at least 120Gb or more.

You should do next if you want to optimize your system for working with SSD drive:
  • ■ Use Windows 7 (8), it automatically switches off a lot of disk write functions for SSD drives, like last access time and similar (and you don't care about it). Google to see what else you might switch off to ensure long life of SSD drive.
    ■ Buy a lot of memory (32GB) so that all programs can work normally.
    ■ Buy UPS to do not have power failures while writing something on disk.
    ■ And use SSD disk as scratch disk, but limit scratch size to lets say 1gb max.
    SSD Disks have 1000000 writes per cell. SSD disk it self knows the number of writes to cells, and automatically moves files to spread eaqually writes over all cells. So your static data (as you think) is not static at all, it moves around automatically without your knowing. So its important to have UPS. Otherwise you trust your power company too much, and you are doomed to be proven wrong.
    ■ 2nd most important thing about SSD disks is never to fill it above 50% of its full size. For example if you have SSD 250 GB, you should max to 125GB, and don't use above that size because of automatic background file repositioning. Unfortunetly Windows 7 takes alot of space, but fortunately a lot of that is installations/update backup files so you can revert to previous version. You can google for such directories in Windows 7(8), and move them to magnetic drive and use MKLINK /J dos command to link its content to its original locations. I have relocated :
      ■ Windows\Installer
      ■ Windows\SoftwareDistribution
      ■ MSOCache

    DO NOT move any SxS folders, or you will degrade performance of your applications start time.
    ■ And most important thing is after 2 years of usage of SSD disk buy new one. Make clone of you original disk. You can sell old one, or not, your choice. This is important to ensure that your disk wont fail, and you wont loose any of data. This rule applies also for magnetic drives, unfortunately clone on magnetic disks will work a lot slower.

Above setup should ensure fastest HDD responses, and produce long life of your SSD disk.
Having scratch file on other drive wont produce desired effect so do not move it, just size it down.

My W7 performs full boot in 7 seconds, recover from sleep in 4 seconds (but that might be also response of my monitor who knows). All times are until I see login screen.

TIP: if you feel your OS is using too much of RAM memory send it to Sleep, and wake it up immediately. That should free some of memory used for caching files in memory.
 
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dacquesta1

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Jan 1, 2014
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I have to agree, having the page file on my ssd eliminates most lag from windows paging everything to disk. I paid 100 for my 128GB Toshiba Q Pro and it comes up as 8+ years of life left with my current data usage trends. I'll replace it long before then.
 
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TheColaKid

TheColaKid

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Dec 31, 2013
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i dont want to hijack this thread but since i see this conversation going on i really would like to ask. what about putting scratch temp etc onto a second smaller ssd? im curious about longevity of the drive by reducing writes but also curious if there would be a significant speed reduction by using a second drive for those functions.. ive been doing a lot of reading on the matter but everyone who asks those questions seems to be doing so about a hdd and not an ssd
 
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dacquesta1

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Jan 1, 2014
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I think the more important issue is the amount of RAM that you have, less RAM=more paging. Having your scratch and paging files on an SSD DO greatly reduce lag that you see with a mechanical drive, however I think you would be better served spending said money on a small SSD on more RAM. It really depends on your system setup and what you plan on doing. Example, right now I have 4GB DDR2 1066 on my Q6600 setup with a 4GB pagefile on my SSD (OS Drive) and 1GB pagefile on my other 3 disks. When my FX 8320 and 8GB ram arrive, I will be removing the 1GB page files on the mechanical disks. Windows loves to page everything when you have 4GB ram, doesn't seem to be much of an issue with 8GB+.
 
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macreverend

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Jan 14, 2014
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More ram is the place to start...16gb is good enough for some serious Pshop files....but buying a second ssd for a scratch is a good bet ( 80gb is more than enough ) failing that....partition one of the 500gb files...1st partition ( 50GB ) can be assigned the scratch disk, 2nd Partition for backups etc....definitely keep your OS and applications on the Samsung...and make a scratch disk on a different drive.
 
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