Scratch Disk Help

[stephaniek84885611]

I am getting an "Scratch dish is full" error and have folowed many tutorials on changing the scratch disk or even clearing it out.  None have worked for me.  When I get to the scratch disk options, I am unable to change, edit, move, add any files so my problem persists.  Please help me.  I use Photoshop for work and am unable to work due to this issue.  Thanks. 

[Per Berntsen]

Your screenshot shows that you only have one drive, with 26.5 GB free space, which isn't a lot.

What is the total capacity of the drive? You should always have at least 20% free space on the C drive.

Also, it doesnt' take much for Photoshop to use many gigabytes of scratch space.

If you have a desktop computer, get another internal hard drive to use for the scratch disk.

If you have a laptop, get a fast (USB 3) external disk.

You should probably also clear out some space on the C drive - you could for instance move all your photos to the new drive.

In case some Photoshop temp files haven't been deleted as they should, with Photoshop closed, open the File Explorer, and see if you have any files on the C drive named Photoshop Tempxxxxxxxxx (where x can be any number). If so, delete them all, then empty the Recycle bin.

[PAWU]

I have now the same problem on my colleagues Laptop:

First the picture is a small one. Second the operation asked for is a simple crop. Third there is on C (250 Gb SSD disk) still about have the space free.

I know that it is not the latest version of Photoshop, but as this, I'm sure it worked before.

Now before I contact my helpdesk, I would like to know about possible causes for this.

As you see, it's Photoshop 2015.1.2 running under Windows 7.

[PAWU]

My problem was this one: 'Scratch Disk Full' Error even though it can't be?

My colleague cropped inches instead of pixels and 600in is quite huge!

[davescm]

My colleague cropped inches instead of pixels and 600in is quite huge!

Easily done - thanks for coming back and letting us know

Dave

[StrongBeaver]

If you're using a scratch disk which contains more free space then the primary disk, why does Photoshop fire disk space full errors. You'd think if the primary drive has only 3-4 gigs free for example, and the second scratch disk has 50 gigs free that you'd not see this error.  Could this be on part of Windows ?

[JJMack]

Photoshop uses both Scratch space and Temp space. Photoshop will fill its first scratch disk before using the second scratch disk. Both Temp space and Scratch space is allocated from a disk free space.   User Temp Space is normally on your OS boot disk.   You OS needs free space on your boot disk to be able to run.   It is not a good idea to use your Boot Disk as Photoshop First scratch disk if you do not have  IMO 100GB+ free space on you boot disk.    If you are getting Disk full message and there is still free space for Photoshop Scratch.  You Boot disk man be full and Photoshop is trying to user TEMP space.   Photoshop uses Temp space for Auto recovery files,  Temp Work files for opened smart objects etc.

[StrongBeaver]

It sounds as if you're saying, if your low on disk space on your primary drive, not to use your primary drive rather strictly a secondary.

[JJMack]

If your boot disk does not have 100+GB free do not use it as your first Photoshop scratch disk use it as your Photoshop last scratch disk.  You can order the scratch disk list order.

[JJMack]

You may be able to use windows  Disk Cleanup and Cleanup up system files  to free up space on your C:  It look like you may ne using a laptop and only have a c: drive.  If your is not a laptop you may want to disable Hibernation.  There is a command line tool for doing that.  You can than delete the hidden hibernation file on your c: which is the size of you machine ram.  So something like 8 to 16GB.  If yours is a laptop for a little over $100 you can add a small external usb3 SSD  128GB 256GB. very small and portable. that will not drain much battery power.