Ok, so I bought a really fast 2nd harddrive (wd2000jb), now I need to decide whether to make it my Photoshop and WinXP cache drive, or if I should make it my primary and use my old one (slower) as the cache drive.

Anyone have any opinions on this?

From what I have read Photoshop does better if the cache drive is seperate from the main drive.

I've never tested this, I keep both on the same drive and don't seem to have any issues.

- Noel

from what ive read , i think the faster drive should be your chache as this is the one that would be the one that is used the most after you load a program into memory.

Wouldn't buss speed be far more important than access speed for this?

I'm thinking about putting one of the old 40 or 60 gb in for purely scratch disking. Photoshop CS indicates that some 16 bit .psd images are near a gig each so with 30-50 history states that should be enough

Sorry about jumping into an old post but I just found it and this is an issue that I've spent at least a bit of time think over.

I have noticed a speedup since I moved my VM and scratch to the second drive, but I don't know how much speed is because of the scratch and how much is because I moved the pagefile. But I do feel more confident now (like the risk has been spread out).

Doug you mention your pagefile. I know the term but don't really know what (which) file(s) you are refering to. As yesterday is my first with XP, I'd like to learn about this and why it is important to back-up. Can you help?

I put into my new box a 160gb [already had it] for programs, (2) 250 gb drives for data, and a 60gb that was in an old abandoned box for a scratch/cache drive. Then told XP to store data on the 1st 250 and wrote a batch file to copy the differences from the data on the first to the 2nd 250.

If I figure out the pagefile I'll write another to copy it somewhere else too. In another post I mentioned a double density DVD Burner but haven't used it. The discs are still $10 at this point.

Thanks
Robert Collins

By pagefile I simply meant the temporary file Windows uses for virtual memory. You can control it via the System control panel.