What's the best scratch drive location for PSP X9

[dondean]

I have a desktop PC running Windows 10.

• I have a single 1T internal drive and have Windows and X9 installed on the C partition.
  Have a D partition also on the drive.
  I have an external HD via USB connection.

Of these three locations, which would be the best for the X9 scratch drive?
Thanks.

[Forriner]

The experts usually advise you to use the external drive, because that way you spread read/writes over two different drives / heads. Two partitions on a single drive are both serviced by the same read/write heads.
USB 3 drives should not be a problem. I have no idea if USB 2 transfer rates could be a speed bottle neck. I guess you'll just have to try, unless someone else here has an expert answer.

[dondean]

Thanks Forriner.
I'll try the USB drive and see how it does. Will do a speed test and compare it with my current setup (Scratch drive on the C partition)
Don't know if it is a USB 2 or 3, I'll have to check, but the test will tell me if it's a good idea.
Thanks.

[LeviFiction]

Not an expert answer, probably a very silly one though. I used a RAM disk. Just a temporary fake disk saved in RAM. I started doing this originally so that the 32-bit version of PSP could use more of my RAM. And it was faster than using my current harddrive for the reasons Forriner mentioned. Also, back then, they didn't allow you to use external drives. They claimed the USB interface would be too slow so the SUB drive never appeared in the list. Now we have the 64-bit version, so I don't actually use the scratchdisk, maybe that's stupid on my part. I really don't know. But I haven't had any issues where a scratchdisk would have helped.

[dondean]

Not an expert answer, probably a very silly one though. I used a RAM disk. Just a temporary fake disk saved in RAM. I started doing this originally so that the 32-bit version of PSP could use more of my RAM. And it was faster than using my current harddrive for the reasons Forriner mentioned. Also, back then, they didn't allow you to use external drives. They claimed the USB interface would be too slow so the SUB drive never appeared in the list. Now we have the 64-bit version, so I don't actually use the scratchdisk, maybe that's stupid on my part. I really don't know. But I haven't had any issues where a scratchdisk would have helped.

Hey LeviFiction, that's really thinking "outside the box". I've not heard of someone doing this before. Very interesting.

[TimW]

Would a small SSD work for a Cache, Temp, and/or Scratch Disk ?

[Luxi_Turna]

By FAR the best is a ram drive. I have 32G with a 16G ram drive. I also put windows temp files and the swap file there. It boots FAST and all apps are faster. I also download to it so setup progs go away after I install them.

Yes, win swaps even with lots of mem because Win memory mgmt sux dix. I know because I wrote the memory mgr for a commercial language. Less fragmentation. I use winramtech ramdrive enterprise.

[df]

Would a small SSD work for a Cache, Temp, and/or Scratch Disk ?

It should be optimal since read/write speeds being fast are the main reason to get one of those.

[Jean-Luc]

Yes, win swaps even with lots of mem because Win memory mgmt sux dix. I know because I wrote the memory mgr for a commercial language.

I don't want to offend you but as I'm a French user, my English is not my native language. It is difficult for me to understand "mgmt", "sux", "dix", "mgr". I suppose they are abbreviations. Could you be more explicit? Thank you.

[Ken Berry]

Jean-Luc -- I take your point! Mgmt means "management". But I'm afraid I can't write in English what "sux dix" really means as it will attract the censor part of our Board software. Essentially it means "faire une pipe à quelqu'un"! Essentially she is trying to say that Windows memory management is pretty bad.

[photodrawken]

I'm soooo very skeptical about needing to use a RAM disk with modern operating systems.

Here's a link to an article that explains the pros and cons of RAM disks:
https://www.howtogeek.com/171432/ram-di ... t-use-one/
(Especially note the paragraph about the silliness of pointing Photoshop's scratch disk to a RAM disk. Of course, that's PS and we don't know how PSP handles things....)

An important thing to keep in mind is that when you create a RAM disk, you've made that amount of RAM unusable for anything else -- if your image editing needs to calculate a complex adjustment effect, you're S.O.L. and are forcing the operating system to use a (virtual) disk input/output method instead of simply assigning more RAM to the calculations. Likewise if you need to run more than one program at a time.

By the way, Microsoft's modern concept of memory use in Windows is "Unused RAM is wasted RAM." Makes a lot of sense when you think about it. That's why Windows memory management is considered to be really excellent --it's doing all the various activities relating to pre-fetching data, managing virtual address mapping, dynamically loading code pages, etc., etc., etc., in order to give you a smooth user experience. So stop looking at Task Manager graphs, obsessing over performance stats you don't really understand, and...just...relax.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: I agree with the others here who have said that the best location for a scratch drive is on a separate physical drive, whether that drive is a HDD or a SSD, because that eliminates disk input/output contention issues with using one set of read/write heads (for HDDS) or one read/write queue (for SSDs). I kind of doubt that a USB device would be good (but I'm not at all sure about that).

[Forriner]

^^^ now read that again ^^^

[flagpole]

Yep that.
/thread

[Jean-Luc]

Jean-Luc -- I take your point! Mgmt means "management". But I'm afraid I can't write in English what "sux dix" really means as it will attract the censor part of our Board software. Essentially it means "faire une pipe à quelqu'un"! Essentially she is trying to say that Windows memory management is pretty bad.

Ken, I'm not sure if "faire une pipe" is pretty bad...
But I understand what you mean.
Thank you for this slang English lesson...

[cosmicDread]

I've written scripts that run for 8 to 12 hours. What I've learned from this experience is to pay attention to PSP's (X8, X9) temp folder. I would see the script go from fast to slow. Eventually I figured out that the temp folder was what was causing the slowdown (that and the Undo depth). So I would stop the script after an hour, clear the temp folder, and then restart the script. So does it make sense for me to use a RAM DISK. Yes it does. I am grateful for this suggestion, and I've started using a RAM disk just for PSP. I installed Buffalo RAM disk, yesterday. It's free. It loads a RAM disk automatically with each restart, so I am happy.