Usb 3.0 as scratch disk in photoshop?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 5, 2022
5 replies
11313 views

I'm trying to use a SanDisk 256gb usb 3.0 thumb drive on windows as scratch disk and it's formatted as FAT32 and Photoshop 2022 will not recognize the drive in scratch disk preferences, so should I format the thunb drive to NTFS?

Windows

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JHillPhD

Known Participant

I have a SanDisk external SSD 1TB and I have formatted it to "MacOS Journaled"but you can format it to NTFS since it's faster than the other formats. If you work between both PC and Mac then FAT32 is the way to go. Once you're done start up Photoshop then go to Preferences -- Scratch Disks and you should see your drive in the list. Click the check box and move it to the top of the list so Photoshop knows to use that drive first for the heavy lifting and make sure it's empty with no files saved on it to get the most out of it.

Chris 486

Community Expert

I would recommend formatting to NTFS for better speed. It may help the drive to be recognized as well. Are you getting any errors specifically or are you just not seeing it as an option?

Ged and Test do have a point as thumb drives can be more delicate to use. Yes, they can and will work, but also yes that they are not normally recommended for scratch disk use.

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David Frock Nor CalAuthor

Participating Frequently

I don't see the drive as an option in preferences, it says drive c: my main hard drive and there is no drive d: which is the usb 3.0 drive that is recognized in file explorer as well as recognized when I go to file>save or save as.. in photoshop. I think I went to format the thumb drive as NTFS on my computer , which is windows 10, and it has 2 ways to format the drive , quick way does the format in under ten seconds and the slow way which looked like it would take 12 to 24 hours to format at the rate it was going and I did quick format and it doesn't show up I'm preferences so maybe if I try to format it the slow way?

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David Frock Nor CalAuthor

Participating Frequently

I know the page says no thumb drives and the photoshop preferences won't even recognize the thumb drive as drive d: like my computer will show it as drive d: so yeah thumb drives won't work and the other poster said use a ssd drive with USB 3.0 because they are built differently and so did the adobe chat agree with that

T

Test Screen Name

Legend

It may seem that an external hard drive is just the same thing as a thumb drive. But really, they are not. They just aren't made for that sort of heavy use. Without recommending it for this use, I note that Sandisk make a range of "Portable SSD".

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John Dzwonar5FAE

Participant

this is purely misinformation. Nothing is different internally form a flash drive and an external hard drive. The only differences are physcial size and internal size. The format of a drive is the format of a drive. The vessel and sahpe that drive comes in mean literally nothign to your computer. This is simply an issue wioth the very unstable architecture of Mac OS. This dosnt happen on my PC

D Fosse

Community Expert

Yes much faster than the spinning drives I had been using.

Even a 250GB system drive should be usable as pimary scratch disk, and even go a pretty long way, if you clean it out thoroughly and move everything possible over to external storage. That's always better than scratch on external drives.

Just remember to never save directly to an external drive. Save locally, then move. Having to rely on external drives is cumbersome in any case, but a few precautions make it at least workable and safe.

A standard configuration of operating system and a range of applications will take up around 80-120 GB. The rest can be used for primary scratch.

The user account accumulates a lot of unnecessary items. Start with Disk Cleanup in the operating system. This can be surprisingly effective. Next, for Windows there is a free utility called WinDirStat, which shows exactly what's filling up the drive and where it is. A lot of it can be deleted without harm. The outlined area here is the user account. Also, hibernation can be disabled, and then the big red blob here disappears: