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Tip #83 - Fragmentation...

[ What's a 'scratch' disk?

> Photoshop keeps telling me my scratch disk is full
> In the 'preferences' I find the primary scratch disk is 'startup' .
> I have no idea what this is about
> Can you tell me what to do? Thanks!
> Cheers,

A continuing problem...

Photoshop wants your scratch disk to be defragmented. That means no file fragments hanging around, but just good, clean drive space.

Well, we all know that each time you write something to the hard drive, it's written way down there at the end of the bit-chain. You've got files that are segmented (fragmented) and spread all over that drive.

To make things worse, when you delete or erase a file, it leaves a hole. Nothing is put there until you fill up the drive, and it comes back around, snooping for blank space pidgeonholes to store stuff in. Sort of like my garage.

If it is using the root volume ("startup" in your case), you need to defragment the drive. Perhaps you also need to do some house-cleaning and free up some space. (Also like my garage!)

Photoshop wants at least as much scratch disk as physical memory, or

3-times the largest file you'll be working on, which ever is larger.

I have a 40 meg partition on my hard drive which is actually called
"Scratch Disk" which I keep empty, and defragged all the time for
Photoshop. We po people here in the backwoods of Virginia can't afford
memory, and all I've got is 32 megs!


Now, when you're done with that... come'on out... I've got this garage...

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