Imac external drive for photoshop scratch

[border_all]

Hi

Looking at buying an external disk for an imac 27'' I have a 1.5 tb now on usb2 but it's really spoken for what I was thinking of was maybe using a thunderbolt drive one bit of a problem I can't work out how these work

It looks as if many drives are sata 3 and the connection is via thunderbolt (is that 1 or 2 cables it uses) if so is it worth going thunderbolt over usb 3 it looks as if most are 7200rpm

What are you folks doing for scratch please, it's fair saying I am not a huge photoshop user and primary use lightroom so don't want to go silly money and thought even make a partion and from time to time just format it

Cheers

Allan

 

[neil_g]

Thunderbolt for storage is huge overkill right now. Like you say data is the bottle neck in this scenario. Even with ssd.

If you can then go for more ram as its used before scratch.

 

[border_all]

Thanks Neil, what is a decent amount of Ram please

Would you still put a portion on the internal disk for a bit extra scratch space even though the drive is used for the OS X as well

 

[neil_g]

What have you got already and how complex are your edits?

Photoshop (assuming cs5 or greater on mac) will take as much ram as you can throw at it.

Photoshop will always use ram before scratch, so with enough ram a fast scratch is less important and can be left on default (personally I have 16gb and I run an internal ssd anyway).

 

[border_all]

I am using cc2014 my edits are not complex I would say

The ram is at 8gb now on 2 by 4 sticks the drive is 1tb 7200rpm

Using i5 3.2 ghz 1gb video

As my machine is new its a glass out job for harddrive so that's a non starter as I think I will add applecare, you probably know I can get at ram

 

[neil_g]

Maybe monitor your Photoshop memory usage and see if your running out before spending out

 

[border_all]

Cheers I'll give that a try, is that the activity monitor in utilities

Only been on Mac about 15 month on windows scratch on the main drive causes a heap of fragmentation, macs don't seem to have any defrag option

 

[boyfalldown]

Fwiw my iMac is setup with 24gb ram. I rarely if ever find cs6 using a scratch disk

 

[border_all]

Thanks Hugh

It's useful for me if I decide to increase it means that 2 8gb sticks making total of 24gb would stop defragmentation on my OS X disk

Cheers

 

[neil_g]

to be honest fragmentation of files is less of an issue these days, journalled filesystems tend to look after themselves and most OS take care of things behind the scenes anyway.

(unless you run a SSD)

 

[border_all]

Thanks Neil yes I have read that OS X even more than windows as the file system run in a more efficient system

 

[neil_g]

i cant even remember the last time i degragged windows

 

[border_all]

Yes from windows 7 it became part of the OS and instead of defrag you had to optimise the disk that worked fairly well as long as the PC was left on sometimes so it could run its own maintainence never was much good for me as I always shut it down

With the Mac it's always on checked the power consumption and it's very low like the system a great deal apart from Adobe lightroom map module that for me will not function under Yosemite

Hoping my new toy comes today feels like I have waited ages lol