Sipowicz

PC to Mac Platform Question

Thanks again for the previous info.

this lacie 120gig hd has its own formatting software acording to the lacie.com site.

It will create 32 gig partions in win98se

My question is are these going to be separate disc drives d, e, f, etc

the reason I wonder that is that I am interested in using on of those as a scratch disc

What do you think???

Thanks for your advice

tech newbie Laura

Bacardi

USB2 full speed and Firewire are quite fast, but imo an external HDD ios not made for running progs, including scratch. (scratch is only important if you don't have enough memory, RAM, to work with your files)

If it comes with this soft, then why not use it? Fat32 has a limitation at some 30GB. So partitions will be made, and they will have their own drive letters.

Sipowicz

Hi Erik,

Thanks

I have firewire.

my original c drive where I have all my programs is quantum fireball 13 gig hence
the purchase of the 120gig

so you are saying that a drive letter will be assigned to each 30 gig partition
so that is good

I could not use one of these partitions as a 30 meg scratch?

I have 768 megs of ram...
what is the actual concept of the scratch disc and is usually the main c drive
it something to with virtual memory?

laura

Bacardi

A scratch file is used to store data on. It is *best* to m?ake Photoshop's first scratch on a second HDD, but as far as I know, an external one is too slow. Don't forget Firewire and USB are measured in bits, not bytes.

Second best is to have it on another partition.

You can also put it on the same partition as your operating system, but, because your Win98 has its own scratch file on that one, both may start interacting and this will lead to a crash. This does not happen all the time, and most of this info dates from the time of 5GB HDD's and even less.

I have a second HDD for backup etc, and on it I made a partition of 1GB that is solely used by PS for its scratch file. This is more than sufficient if you have 512MBRAM or more, unless you want to work with files of several hundred MB.

If you have one internal HDD, and you have a few GB free, then you can put the scratch file on it. If you encounter problems, then it's the time to do something. Don't make too much of it.

30GB as scratchfile is sheer overkill. As are those very big HDD's iunless you do video or download tons of music and movies.

I get the impression that you put too much emphasis on hardware. Probably "good advice" from friends or salesmen.

Don't forget to be creative, ok?