Scratch disks - quick and dirty

[samsonlonghair]

I was unsatisfied with the performance of the old 250GB hard drive in my MacPro so I upgraded to a 1TB hard drive with a faster read/write speed. I know a ssd would be even faster, but that will have to wait for another payday. I just spent all my money on RAM.

So what do I do with my old 250GB drive? I'm thinking I can make it a scratch disk. But wait...if it was too slow for my operating system will it be too slow to use as a scratch disk?

If money were no object, I'd just use solid state drives all around, but for now I'm using old hard drives I cannibalized from old computers.

[isiolia]

I probably wouldn't bother with trying to remap OS X's virtual memory swap location, especially if you've got a decent amount of RAM in there now. Adobe stuff does its own virtual memory though, which is simple to direct at a different drive (it's just in the preferences). So, that'd be worth considering. Not that a faster drive isn't better, but not sharing disk access with all of the rest of the stuff the machine is doing is beneficial in its own right (as the Adobe page points out though, if/when you get an SSD for the primary drive, just use that instead of redirecting the scratch disk to a HDD).

[Ziggy587]

Not that a faster drive isn't better, but not sharing disk access with all of the rest of the stuff the machine is doing is beneficial in its own right

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It would be worth at least checking it out, since a lot of programs allow you to easily set scratch drives.

[samsonlonghair]

Thanks for your words gentlemen. I'm going to utilize a Scratch disk based on your recommendations. Now I'm looking into a RAID configuration. I found another 250GB hard drive. I'm planning to stripe both drives together in a RAID 0 plan to maximize space, speed and performance.

[Ziggy587]

Thanks for your words gentlemen. I'm going to utilize a Scratch disk based on your recommendations. Now I'm looking into a RAID configuration. I found another 250GB hard drive. I'm planning to stripe both drives together in a RAID 0 plan to maximize space, speed and performance.

I don't know man, RAID 0 and spanned volumes are risky. Unless you have a backup solution in place, you'd be doubling your risk of data loss. Unless you mean you plan to RAID 0 the two drives and use them solely as a scratch (junk) drive, then you wouldn't have to worry about data loss.

[samsonlonghair]

Thanks for your words gentlemen. I'm going to utilize a Scratch disk based on your recommendations. Now I'm looking into a RAID configuration. I found another 250GB hard drive. I'm planning to stripe both drives together in a RAID 0 plan to maximize space, speed and performance.

I don't know man, RAID 0 and spanned volumes are risky. Unless you have a backup solution in place, you'd be doubling your risk of data loss. Unless you mean you plan to RAID 0 the two drives and use them solely as a scratch (junk) drive, then you wouldn't have to worry about data loss.

Exactly. I'm going to RAID 0 the two drives just to make a larger scratch drive. No important files will be kept on scratch.

This should speed up read/write access to scratch. I suppose that the theoretical maximum factor would be double speed increase in a situation where the data is always distributed perfectly evenly across both disks, but real-world factors may slow this down. I guess I'll find out when I get to work.

Looks like the OSX disk utility with the GUI cannot build RAID arrays anymore. Odd. I could have sworn that function was built in on earlier versions. Looks like I'm going to need to utilize the terminal to run diskutil.

I do take the risk of data loss seriously. My primary archive stretches from 2002 'till today. I have backed up my archive in three different locations. Some time in the future, I'm going to be able to afford to backup my archive online via Amazon Glacier or a similar service.