How to Connect an External HDD as Scratch Drive for Photoshop

The Online Photographer

Ctein of The Online Photographer describes how to use an external hard drive as a scratch drive to speed up the performance of Photoshop.

In his post, Ctein reports on the performance of two drives: the 750GB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro and the OWC Mercury On-The-Go FireWire 800/400 + USB case with a Hitachi 200 GB hard disk drive.

He writes, “Both drives are good ways to goose up Photoshop. If you are a traveling photographer, the On-The-Go drive will perform at least as well as your internal drive and probably substantially better. If you’re working from a desk, the Mercury Elite drive will give Photoshop a real kick in the pants.”

Go for the eSATA interface though, or at least the FireWire 800 interface for an appreciable speed bump. USB 2.0? Forget about it! It’s like an ant swimming in sugar syrup, taking its sweet sweet time.

[Via: The Online Photographer]

Published by Chris Malinao

Chris teaches Lightroom as workflow software to photography students at the FPPF, Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation. He also teaches smartphone photography.