Photoshop and disk usage

[yossefelbaz]

Hello,

I have noticed that my computer's hdd led is flashing and working non stop. After checking i found out it was the Photoshop program.

How can i make it stop or even lower it down if possible?

Intel i7 6700K 4GHz
Crucial Ballistix 32GB 2400GHz
ZOTAC GTX 970 4GB
Intel SSD 256GB
SanDisc SSD 120GB as scratch/cache disk
WD RE4 1TB HDD for storage
Microsoft WIndows 7 x64 Ultimate
Adobe Photoshop CC 2016

Thank you.

 

[jasonkaler]

with 32GB, you should have no problem, unless you're working on really huge files.
And by really huge, I mean files that are many GB in size.

Another cause could be that your drive with your scratch files or paging files is getting full - then windows battles to allocate new clusters.

There are many settings you can play with
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

If that fails, look here:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2201792

 

[yossefelbaz]

with 32GB, you should have no problem, unless you're working on really huge files.
And by really huge, I mean files that are many GB in size.

Another cause could be that your drive with your scratch files or paging files is getting full - then windows battles to allocate new clusters.

There are many settings you can play with
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

If that fails, look here:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2201792

My files are usually around the 24MB for JPEG/RAW and 100MB for PSD. The scratch disk is 30% full so i don't think this is the problem.

Is there a way to know which hard drive is the one that causing this behavior? Like some program that showing disk usage for each hard drive on the system.

Thank you.

 

[fluked]

Not sure it will stop the flashing, but to stop the thrashing use imdisk and create 8 to 16GB virtual drive then map all caches, scratcges, etc. to it. Can help performance too.

 

[mjslakeridge]

I don't know about Windows 7, but in Windows 8.1 if you open Task Manager, then Open Resource Monitor, you can click on the Disk tab it will show processes with disk activity. Also in Task Manager, under the Performance tab, each disk utilization graph is shown.

 

[jasonkaler]

My files are usually around the 24MB for JPEG/RAW and 100MB for PSD. The scratch disk is 30% full so i don't think this is the problem.

Is there a way to know which hard drive is the one that causing this behavior? Like some program that showing disk usage for each hard drive on the system.

Thank you.

To see which drives are busy in Win7 and below, do the following:

Go to start / run "perfmon.exe" (it's in C:\Windows\System32)
Under monitoring tools, you'll see "performance monitor"
Click the green plus to add counters (see http://www.nextofwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Performance-Monitor-add-counter.png )
look for "Physical Disk" and under that "% disk time", and in the box below, select "All Instances"
This will add one graph for each disk you have.
%disk read and %disk write may also be useful if you want to see if it's reads or writes.

Also Useful is under "memory" - "page reads / sec" - you probably want a pretty small scale for this one as this is not a percentage but a count.
This tells you how much disk activity is caused by windows using the page file because of a shortage of ram.
This should actually sit around 0 except for a few spikes, for a system with a lot of ram unless there is an issue.