Best External Scratch Disk for iMac?

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Level 1

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Best External Scratch Disk for iMac?

I'm a new Mac user and i'm now using my iMac as my primary computer. I've been looking online to find out which approach is best when using adobe products that require scratch disks. Should i use external USB or Firewire interface? What I've done for my windows system in the past is I purchased a 10,000rpm hard drive and dedicated it as a scratch disk and installed it internally. If I do this with either USB or firewire. My big plan is I would go and get a 10krpm hard drive and by an enclosure with usb and firewire. Anyone know how I should approach this on an iMac will my plan work?

Thanks!

iMac 24" 3.06 Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Jun 11, 2010 6:44 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 1, 2010 10:54 PM in response to mdgprojects

I know that a fast internal drive is always the recommended way to go.

Having said that, and owning a Mac Pro with 4 drive bays, I'm not certain what the best option is on an iMac. I would think that the internal drive should be used if possible.

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Answer 2

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Jul 1, 2010 11:00 PM in response to Cut'n Paste

New iMacs have FW 800, so anything with that connection should suffice. I've rolled my own:

Macally GS350SUAB Hi-Speed eSATA/1394A/1394B/USB2.0 Storage Enclosure for 3.5inch SATA HDD
Hitachi 1 TB Deskstar SATA 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive HD31000 IDK/7K

Got the combo for $145 from Amazon in early April.

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Answer 3

Network 23

Level 6

12,351 points

Jul 2, 2010 1:21 AM in response to mdgprojects

The point of the scratch disk is to help out the RAM. This means you want the fastest drive you can hook up because it will be the closest to the speed of RAM. That means, not USB. If you have to go external, use FireWire, preferably FireWire 800. I have a Mac Pro so of course I use one of the drive bays.

If you have only one internal drive it should not be set as a scratch disk. The app's requests for scratch disk access will conflict with both the app's requests for document access and also the OS requests for its own disk access and what you will end up with is everybody fighting over the one disk and overall access will slow down. The scratch disk needs to be a separate volume (not just partition) from the boot disk so that the access requests can be in parallel, instead of conflicting.

When I used my PowerBook as my main Mac I kept a fast FireWire external hooked up during Photoshop use to keep that scratch disk load off the poor little laptop drive that had enough to do already.

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