Photoshop CS3 slow w/USB hard drives.

#1 08-26-2008, 01:05 PM

Hello all,

I'm running into a strange problem and was hoping someone could direct me on how to fix it.

I'm running an Intel Q6600 w/4GB of ram 1.5TB in a Raid 10 (4 750GB hard drives) that I had custom built from R-Tech Computers. The machine is fast and Photoshop runs great until I hook up my external USB hard drives.

I have 4 hard drives ranging from 500GB to 1TB. When I hook them up and run Photoshop, The system slows down to a crawl. I take them off, it runs great.

Photoshop is obviously looking at the drives for whatever reason. Does anyone know of any option to tell it not to look at those drives.

#2 08-26-2008, 02:54 PM

Go in to the Photoshop preferences and make sure it isn't trying to use them
as scratch disks. I have lots of problems using a USB external hard drive as
a scratch disk.

#3 08-27-2008, 11:11 AM

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this, I did check and under preferences, it is set only use C drive as a scratch drive. And sometimes I do get a scratch drive is full error message.

I dont know if there is an option somewhere to increase the size of the scratch drive as I have plenty of disk space.

#4 08-27-2008, 11:14 AM

PS will use all the space available on the nominated drive.

#5 08-27-2008, 11:36 AM

Hi John,

Any suggestions on why the machine might be slow when the USB drives are plugged in.

#6 08-27-2008, 01:10 PM

It happens on my system too, but here I think it's BIOS related. If I reboot with the USB drive plugged in, it hangs at POST.

I haven't bothered to investigate it since I have eSATA on this mobo and I'm going there any day now.

#7 08-27-2008, 01:17 PM

In Photoshop, have you opened from, or saved to, those USB drives in the past?

Photoshop is like an elephant (and I don't mean the grey skin) – it remembers where files have come from and where they have gone to and may be messing around on those drives looking for something.

That's why conventional wisdom says always open from and save to a local drive. The files can be moved from or to another location without the involvement of Photoshop.

#8 08-27-2008, 01:18 PM

I still think it's bloody Bonjour!

#9 08-27-2008, 01:40 PM

Free-agent: I've done the latest bios update. It has not helped unfortunately. I am headed to ESata and when its time to replace the drives, I will replace them with ESata, but for now, I have to use what I already have.

John - Not 100% sure if I've opened them from the hard drives before or not. I may have. Will try tonight to clear the history of files that it keeps in the recently opened files and see if that helps. Unless you know of any other way to tell it not to look for any files that have been opened in the past.

#10 08-27-2008, 09:41 PM

Isn't Bonjour French for bend over I have a surprise for you? BTW that is an
Apple thing, I guess they aren't perfect after all.

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