Scratch disk full in 2025 but not 2024

[afeinphoto]

Opened up a large psb that was showing scratch disk full (with 200gb free).  File opened up no problem in 2024 version.

[jane-e]

@afeinphoto 

The scratch disk is physical hard drive space. It happens when you don't have enough free HD space for the image. Sometimes the cause is because the user accidentally chose a size in another unit of measurement thinking they were choosing pixels. What is the dimension of the image in pixels?

Jane

[D Fosse]

You probably have a little less disk space now than you had then.

[KR Seals]

Are your Scratch Disk preferences set the same for both 2024 and 2025?

[afeinphoto]

Ok...lets preface this with I'm well aware of how computers and PS works.   This is a bug in the PS2025 system that is not allowing the same file to open that has no problem in 2024.     I went to open the psb in 2025...get scratch disk error.  Close down that program and open in 2024 and no problem.  Same settings on both. 

[D Fosse]

OK, but it would make everything a lot easier for all of us if you showed us screenshots of the actual numbers in Preferences > Scratch Disks.

That would give the engineers something to work with so they can reproduce and fix it.

[afeinphoto]

Side by side preferences of 2024 and 2025.  all settings are same.  This is not a scratch disk issue.  Although I just was able to open up the file in question in 2025.  So not sure it is now repeatable.  Very odd.

[D Fosse]

Well, it is, if you're working with "a large PSB", as you say, with only 165 GB free disk space. That can be gone in no time.

Generally, for most "normal" work, around 250 GB should be considered absolutely bare minimum, but 500 is more comfortable. If you work with big files, you may need 1 TB or more. I have 4 TB available.

Before you protest, this isn't Photoshop, it's raster image editing. It moves huge amounts of data. The scratch file contains all history states for all open documents, with overhead for several advanced functions like smart objects etc. Every history state potentially adds the full decompressed file size.

So my guess is that you're at the scratch disk limit with this file, and it was a tossup which version would report scratch disk full. It will happen again unless you clear out more space.