install Photoshop cs2 to which drive

Hi

new to photoshop, trying to help a friend who has a laptop with 80gig

HD partitioned into 2 * 40 gig.

He has installed CS2 onto D, from my limited knowledge i wondered if

it was better to have CS2 installed on C and to keep his large amount

of images on D and put the XP swap file to D.

I then thought that it might work faster the other way install CS2 on

D keep the swap file on C keep the image files on D.

Either way we have to do a re-install as CS2 is not installed a

program files folder.

 

any thought would be appreciated.

From a performance perspective it matters little. Unless you have a second physical drive using multiple partitions simply guarantees massive seek times when going from one partition to another.

 

With a laptop, using a single partition (C:) on the system and using an external Firewire (IEEE 1394) drive for scratch disk and perhaps a second external Firewire drive for OS SWAP would be the way to go.

 

As you situation stands, the choice matters very little.

 

Caveats given, IIRC, installing on the first partition created (likely C:) will yield slightly better performance. Albeit, where you install the application has less than 60 seconds performance gain on a system with a very slow drive. The location of Photoshop's Scratch Disk matters far more. The former affects application launch time, the latter affects how long operations that exceed your RAM take.

 

hope this helps,

 

Sean

 

http://www.envisagement.com

Sean

thankyou for the quick response it certainly helps, re the scratch disk, my friend has a usb 2 HD i donot think it is firewire.

if we reinstall to C would he be better putting the first scratch disk to D. i am not sure how much the program would use the scratch disk as the system has 1024 meg ram.

thanks again

Hi Paul,

 

You are welcome. :o) You caught my end of day forum schedule on a day when I did it.

 

USB 2.0 should provide reasonable performance so long as the drive is the only one on the hub. If the drive shares the USB with a USB 1.0 or USB 1.1 device performance may suffer (i.e., some mice, CF card readers, ...). You might try the following link to test the system to see what yields the best performance:

 

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

 

Myself, I use a desktop with apps & OS swap on C: (60 GB IDE as my XP install is pre-SP 1 and I have not slipstreamed it), user data on J: (160 GB IDE), backup on K: (200 GB IDE), and PS Scratch Disk on L: (250 GB SATA). But I use four drives.

 

Currently I have Bridge use local cache for Bridge files which reduces performance but allows me to move directories with Bridge cache files intact. If/when I pick up a Western Digital 10,000 RPM Raptor or two I will probably move OS Swap, Bridge cache files to a central location, and/or Photoshop Scratch Disk to their own fast drives.

 

As to scratch disk usage, I have 2 GB RAM and use it a moderate amount on large files (160 MB+ multi layered files). Having a dedicated Scratch Disk for PS does make a moderate performance boost (as opposed to dismal performance). Your mileage may vary depending on image size and the number of history states you retain.

 

enjoy,

 

Sean

 

http://www.envisagement.com

Partitioning a single hard drive slows everything down and pretty much doubles your chance of having problems.

However, NTFS tends to have SERIOUS fragmentation problems so seperating sources of fragmentation (like the "Documents and Settings" folder) onto a sperate partition can keep things running smooth. If your drive isn't overly fragmented seek times between partitions may be long but they won't occur anywhere near as often. It's one of those sitations where you might not know for yourself until you try.