Skip to main content
mistfall
mistfall
Known Participant
February 4, 2021
Question

2 TB free and not enough disk space to save Photoshop file?

  • February 4, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 907 views

I'm running Ps 2021 on a drive with 25 GB free, and saving a file to a drive with 2 TB free, and I'm unable to save the document because I'm "out of disk space".

 

What the heck?  This has been happening a lot, and is starting to make Photoshop unuable for me.

 

Does anybody know what's going on with these ginormous disk space requirements?  

 

I have read certain threads where the poster complaining of this problem is just told to suck it up and get a RAID drive.  Well, for those of us in little home studios with limited budgets, even getting a few terrabytes is something we can't necessarily take for granted.  

 

If this is just the way it is with Photoshop from here on out, it may be time to switch to Affinity and see if that app has a thriftier way of handling memory.

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

c.pfaffenbichler
Community Expert
c.pfaffenbichlerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 4, 2021

What are the Performance and Scratch Disk Preferences settings? 

What have you done about Photoshop performance so far? 

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/scratch-disks-preferences.html

D Fosse
Community Expert
D FosseCommunity Expert
Community Expert
February 4, 2021

Pixel-based image editing requires huge amounts of data to be moved around, much more than can fit in any RAM you may have installed. So that temporary working data are written to disk. This is the scratch disk, and it can easily grow to 100GB or more. In some cases you may need up to a terabyte of scratch space, if you're working on many big files at once.

 

This is just the nature of the game. Don't blame the messenger.

 

Every history state can add the full size of the file. It has to go somewhere. Every new file adds the full size x history states. Smart objects and other file properties add overhead.

 

In short - 25 GB is very little. That disk is almost full, and you need to point Photoshop to another one if you can't clear out space. It's your responsibility to make sure Photoshop has the resources it needs. This is a professional application, and it's optimized for speed and efficiency, nothing else. It doesn't make excuses.

    JJMack
    Community Expert
    JJMackCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 4, 2021

    I has seen PS use way more then 25GB of scratch space when I have run some batch jobs I never run  PS with less than 100GB of scratch space it can use. If I run a particularly  large batch I'll  switch scratch space to my external 4TB disk that has at least 2 TB free and open a bottle of wine.

    JJMack
      Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
      Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices