How much disc space for cs5?

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Morning guys,
Happy Friday!

It looks like I'm gonna have to format my pc (should've bought a mac, I know I know). Windows has spat its dummy out, again! Got some problem with logging me on to a temporary user account and everything I've tried cannot fix it. Anyway, formatting, it's getting done.

I built it from scratch and something I always do is partition the hard drive so I can keep the operating system separate to all my storage in case of viruses and/or general (and to be honest absolutely expectable) windows cock-ups. This has saved me in the past as I could just format the OS "half" and all my music and stuff is safe.

But I slipped up. When I set this pc up I wasn't into photography, and had no idea I'd be installing a massive program like PS. I only made my C:\ 30GB, leaving the other 620GB as storage on D:\. So at the moment all my programs are installed on C:\, except photoshop, which I've annoyingly had to install on D:\. I'm very organised with my pc and having to do this is a real bummer for me.

Usually with something like this temporary user account problem I'd just format the C:\ and leave the D:\ as is, that's the beauty of having it partitioned. But because my partition is nowhere near big enough for PS I figured I'd just redo the whole thing and do it something like 70GB for the C:\.

I know PS uses a lot of disc space temporarily, like these scratch disks and things. What I don't know is just how much. What's a reasonable amount of disc space to have reserved for photoshop alone, to be installed and running perfectly, and obviously with a little bit of headroom too? 10GB? 15GB? More?

I wanna place my partition so that PS runs perfectly on C:\ but also maximise my storage space on D:\.

Any help here would be great guys. Cheers
 
I'm not a fan of partitioning drives like you have, but each to their own.

PS5 takes ~1G on install. You can point it at other disks to use as scratch space, so don't worry about that. More importantly is swap file and hibernate file (which are created by default on a windows install). They are normally each as big as your memory size.

I have a Win 7 SSD of 90G unformatted size (around 84G formatted). It's currently running with 42.04G free....
 
Ok so you're using something like 40GB in total. Roughly how much other software do you have installed? Or is this a dedicated machine?

Out of interest, how do you find the SSD for your OS? Is it any different in use to a regular HDD?

Also, why the gripe with partitioning? I must be missing some disadvantages which I'd certainly like to know about!
 
Disk partitioning: more difficult for things to grow to their natural size. There's no performance gain, no data safety gain so for me it's just another hoop to jump through. If we ever get a laptop with disks partitioned, first thing I do is reinstall to a single partition. But then I never reinstall Windows other than the first install so....

No idea what the SSD vs standard disk is. I bought one when I built this machine, so don't have any direct comparisons. I can say that it feels a lot quicker than the i7 laptop which has a 7200rpm disk in it. OK, the desktop is a more powerful machine anyway but...
 
PS. if you use restore points, that has to come out of the budget for the disk too. I only have a very small restore ability (5G here I think). It only keeps one version max if I remember correctly).
 
Interesting thoughts about partitioning. I know what you mean about things growing to natural sizes. Ha ha that's the mess I'm in now with PS installed on D:\!

Anyway, back on course, is this a dedicated machine then? So windows plus photoshop equals about 40GB? That's more than I was expecting if it is!
 
I agree with Arad.

Split partitioning is for servers, or historical practice for laptops/workstations - there just isn't any benefit in it anymore. Having separate drives will speed your R/W times up, but aside from house keeping, partitioning PCs is a bit historic now and (as you've found out) can create more trouble than it's worth.

If you really, really want to partition, I'd set your C drive to 100Gb minimum.
 
Not dedicated. It is in use 10+ hours a day, almost every day and does everything (image editing, browsing, mail, video editing recoding, MS office etc...). Just looked in Program Files and Program Files (x86) and I'm running about 150 folders in both those locations so a fair bit installed ;).
 
Well this has certainly been a thread well worth starting for me! If I'm not gonna partition the drive then I'll have to buy a separate one for the OS, probs go for an SSD if I do end up doing it. There's no way I want windows installed on the same root as all my music and stuff, no chance! I trust windows about as far as I can fart. If I could afford a mac then it'd be a no-brainer for me.

Now I've gotta weigh up whether the cost of a dedicated OS drive, be it SSD or regular HDD, is worth it for not having a partition. I can see the arguments against partitioning regarding space issues, but at the moment I'm thinking as long as I plan it correctly I shouldn't run into this problem of not enough space again. I never have before and I've been partitioning drives for years.
 
I would think 30-50GB should be plenty, I just checked one of our machines and thats running CS5, Lightroom several other photo programs and windows and thats got around 14gb on it.
One point don't use a seperate partition for a scratch disk, use a seperate drive if possible.
 
Cool. I think I will stick with the partitioning because it's a method I'm comfortable with and it works well for me (except in this rare case where it's fell down ha ha). Also I can't be bothered to fork out for a dedicated HDD when I don't really need one.

Well 30GB wasn't enough. It's a pretty large drive so I can quite easily cope with 80GB for the partition, err on the safe side eh.

This'll give me something to do over the next few days. Oh joy, not!

Thanks for all your time guys
 
Have a look at partition managers. It's often possible to repartition/resize without having to reinstall. I've never used one, so can't recommend one...
 
Thanks for the heads up mate, but it needs formatting anyway because windows has dropped a b*llock, again
 
You still may be able to repartition and leave your data intact, just on a smaller partition...
 
I would have said Partition Magic, but they stopped updating it, and it's incompatible with Win7.

Shame, it was a seriously good bit of kit; and more to the point reliable!
 
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scottthehat said:
you would be better of picking up a cheap 80gb hard drive for the operating system,
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Will probably be relatively slow (small cache of 8Mbytes) compared to the newer disks. You'd be better off just buying an SSD if you want a separate boot drive. Beware though, all SSDs are not created equal....
 
arad85 said:
Will probably be relatively slow (small cache of 8Mbytes) compared to the newer disks. You'd be better off just buying an SSD if you want a separate boot drive. Beware though, all SSDs are not created equal....
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i know that, but, its gotta be better than using one drive for all.
to the op what is the other harrd drive and specs also is howold is your computer.
 
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Sorry about the slow response, had a crazy hectic weekend.

Ok, about the computer. Intel core 2 quad 8400 (2.66 GHz), 4 GB DDR2 RAM, 640GB Seagate HDD 5400rpm, 1GB Radeon HD graphics card, 7.1 soundcard with S/PDIF OUT. Can't remember what motherboard I put in it. Comps about 3 yrs old.

I've been thinking about it this weekend and I think I'm gonna go for a small SSD as has been suggested. After reading a bit about them I'm gonna give it a go, they sound fantastic!
 
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Hi,

Only just seen this so probably a bit late. I would not bother with the expense of a SSD drive. Your current 640gb drive is relatively slow. The benefit of the quick SSD drive will only really be seen in the speed the pc loads the OS and the programs will also launch quicker but once you start to work on your images which reside on the slower drive your not going to see a great benefit, ok the processing may be quicker depending where the photoshop scratch file is but I think you may end up a little frustrated.

As to the discussion around whether to partition the drive, I would be in the 'do it' camp in your case as you only had a single disk. The only reason I say that is for data protection. If you have backup software and use it regularly then ok no real need for the partition but there are other benefits to partitioning, smaller cluster sizes being one.

Someone mentioned that partitioning was only for servers these days :shake: in a corporate network with a domain maybe but not where there is only 1 pc or even just a few in a small business. We have both types of customers!

Paul.
 
PaulF said:
As to the discussion around whether to partition the drive, I would be in the 'do it' camp in your case as you only had a single disk. The only reason I say that is for data protection.
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How does partitioning help with data protection? You should NEVER backup from one partition to another on the same physical disk - that's putting all your eggs in one basket. If the disk fails, BOTH partitions fail. I can't see any other benefit from a data protection point of view.

Also, for cluster sizes, take a look here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/140365

Basically, any practical NTFS filesystem will use 4K clusters.

I'm still at a loss why you'd want to partition a drive... :shrug:
 
arad85 said:
How does partitioning help with data protection? You should NEVER backup from one partition to another on the same physical disk - that's putting all your eggs in one basket. If the disk fails, BOTH partitions fail. I can't see any other benefit from a data protection point of view.
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You are correct, never backup to the same physical disk, I am assuming the OP either backs up to an external drive, second pc. He hasn't mentioned it and it does not seem to be a concern to him so I'm making an assumption.

If you look through the OP's post it would appear he has had issues with Windows going belly up on a number of occasions and therefore in his case it would be beneficial to have the disk partitioned so he can wipe the OS partition-reinstall the OS while keeping his data safe, that's the data protection to which I was referring, sorry didn't make that clear before.

If he uses the whole disk as the 'C' drive then when Windows crashes again (Win XP/Vista from the pc build date) requiring a rebuild then his choices are more limited, ie, attempt a repair using the OS cd or install the OS again to the same partition into a second folder before he would be able to get at his data, assuming he has not backed up absolutely everything before the crash. Then he would be able to back up the data, wipe the drive and rebuild again to get a clean stable install. If he wiped the single partition to do a 'clean' install straight away his data would be gone.

Personally, I don't see any real advantage in not partitioning the drive as long as you plan it correctly in the first place. The better solution is to have multiple physical drives if possible, better performance if configured correctly.

Paul.
 
PaulF said:
If you look through the OP's post it would appear he has had issues with Windows going belly up on a number of occasions
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The obvious solution would be to look after it so that it never needs reinstalling ;) Yes, it is more than possible - even with XP.
 
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