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nicoleskyee
Participant
July 9, 2020
Question

External Hard Drive Not Being Recognized as Scratch Disk

  • July 9, 2020
  • 4 replies
  • 6853 views

I am literally losing my mind with photoshop right now. I have very low storage on my (HP/Windows) laptop and it got harder for me to edit large files on Photoshop. To solve this problem, I bought a 128gb external drive for my computer so I could run that as my primary scratch disk for Photoshop. The drive IS showing up in windows, but no matter what I do it will not show up in PS.

 

Here's what I have tried: 

- running PS as administrator 
- updating PS 

- restarting my computer 

-changing the drive permissions 

- ejecting and reinserting the drive 

- resetting my PS preferences 

- reformatting drive

 

If anyone could help me out you would literally be a lifesaver because I'm going crazy trying to figure this out. 

    4 replies

    M
    Medi23593665nfew
    Participant
    March 15, 2022

    The external device/flash disk you are adding as a scratch disk needs to be formated/erased as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) if you're using Mac OS.

    T
    tmulligan
    Participant
    October 26, 2022

    This seems to be correct, however for those of us that have to use both Windows and OSX this is pretty inconvenient. You either have to buy an add-on app to enable OSX to write to NFTS or a similar middleware app for Windows to read/write to the OSX partition whereas striping externals as FAT32 used to work fine in both environments.

     

    What gives?

    Ussnorway7605025
    Ussnorway7605025
    Legend
    October 26, 2022

    what gives is Apple and Microsoft go out of their way to block each other

    Conrad_C
    Community Expert
    Conrad_CCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 10, 2020

    When you reformatted the drive, did you try different formats? I forget if a Windows Photoshop scratch drive needs to be a specific format (NTFS, FAT32…).

     

    As a Mac user I've used internal and external drives as Photoshop scratch disks for 20 years, so it works fine either way. The main difference today is that with the speed and affordability of large SSDs over USB 3 or Thunderbolt, external scratch drives can be faster than the internal scratch drives of the past.

    N
    nicoleskyeeAuthor
    Participant
    July 10, 2020

    Yes! It gave me two options and I tried reformatting to NTFS but to no avail, the drive is currently formatted as NTFS

    Jon-M-Spear
    Jon-M-Spear
    Legend
    July 9, 2020

    How is it connected?  What build of Windows / Photoshop?

     

    My USB 3.1 raid is used as a scratch disk.  No problems. 

    N
    nicoleskyeeAuthor
    Participant
    July 9, 2020

    It's connected through the USB port in my computer. My Windows and Photoshop are both the most updated they can be so whichever the current versions are. I just have an HP USB 3.0 with 128GB that I'm trying to use

    Ussnorway7605025
    Ussnorway7605025
    Legend
    July 9, 2020

    correct... only internal drives should be used

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