question about scratch disks and brush not being able to draw

[tinyapplesxoxo]

sorry if this is a noob question, silly question or if it's been already discussed- but my brush is unable to draw because i have "scratch disks are full" message showing up.  i recall there are settings in which you clear cache, but if someone could lay out the steps in basic wording, that would be great...i never had this issue before, on this computer. i unfortunately forgot the exact steps, and i looked it up, and it leads to a lot of answers, so i'm just looking for the best more reliable answer possible. i'm using a windows 11. thank you!

[tinyapplesxoxo]

also, if it helps, my computer has 945 gb of storage, and a lot of it is already used. i have 5.97 gb free, so it could just be a storage problem? maybe i should back up and delete items off my computer?  but it could be photoshop settings, so i'm not completely sure

[D Fosse · Accepted solution]

6 GB is nothing. Your disk is full, period. You actually have a much bigger problem than Photoshop - your whole machine may freeze up at any moment. The operating system needs free disk space for routine maintenance, and it doesn't have that now.

Yes, move everything possible off your system drive. Store it on an external drive, USB thumb drives, whatever. Just get it off your system drive. When you've done that, run disk cleanup in Windows. Check as many options as you can for a thorough cleanup.

Don't stop until you have at least 50-100 GB free space, but preferably more. My standard advice is 250-500 GB for Photoshop to work efficiently.

The scratch disk is not an abstract setting, it's real, physical disk space. Image editing requires massive amounts of memory, much more than any RAM you may have installed. So Photoshop writes temporary working data to disk, aka the scratch disk.

If you have to work with limited disk space, reduce history states, if necessary all the way down to 1 or 2. Much of the disk space is occupied by history states, and this will significantly reduce the scratch file size. 

[tinyapplesxoxo]

thank you for this, it's really helpful - i had a feeling my space was getting out of control, i'm going to have to move everything to an extrnal hard drive and possibly cloud storage such as onedrive/google drive....this helps me fully understand my problem is space, so thank you! : )

[jane-e · Accepted solution]

@tinyapplesxoxo 

Photoshop needs a large amount of free space that it uses as a scratch disk. The amount depends on the size of your images, but 5.97 is not enough. Learn more here:

• https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/desktop/troubleshoot/troubleshoot-tools-resources/set-up-and-manag...
• https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop-elements/using/scratch-disks-plug-ins.html

EDIT: posted 37 seconds after DFosse.

Jane

[Trevor.Dennis]

i have 5.97 gb free

By @tinyapplesxoxo

Goodness gracious me!!  I am amazed your computer even runs, yet alone Photoshop.  You no space for Photoshop Scratch files.  I wonder how the Windows Page file is managing, although it probably has reserved space. I can see that you have several replies all saying the same thing.  That's because people can hardly believe what you are tell us.  

I am probably repeating what others have said, but what sort of computer are you using.  If it is a desktop with a tower, then get another drive to unload to.  If it is a laptop, then what are its fastest ports?  You might not have room for a second drive, but pocket drives can be fast enough to share files, depending on the interface.

Tell us exactly what computer you are using, and yopu'll get specific adice.

[Conrad_C]

My laptop has a similar amount of total storage as yours, roughly 1TB (1000MB). 

When we have only 5.97GB free, that means only 0.6% of that storage is free…97.4% is used up! That’s practically full.

I aim to have between 100-200GB of free space at all times, so as needed, I continually move large files and folders off the computer to make sure that much is always free. I would not let my internal storage to be only 0.6% free. That can lead to overall system instability, like crashes and slowdowns, even if Photoshop is not involved.

The amount of free space Photoshop needs for its scratch file depends more or less on the size of the open documents. For example, a small low-resolution web site graphic might not need much scratch space, but a high resolution print image could need over 100GB of scratch disk space. 

[tinyapplesxoxo]

Thank you , i agree. this was extremely helpful, i guess i really need to clean up my computer now!