Do you know what a scratch disk is? A scratch disk is a hard drive space, which Photoshop uses as virtual memory.
Photoshop uses this memory when there isn’t enough RAM to fulfill a task. Photoshop gives many scratch disks so that the user has more space with them.
Scratch Disk
When you are editing large images and layers, then Photoshop takes up a lot of space and creates many temporary files.
- When you are using Photoshop, then you can assign scratch disks to the drive that you want.
If there are no other alternatives, only then users should use their system drive.
Scratch Disks are Full
One of the major reasons scratch disks become full is because of temporary files. They usually fill the drive, before leaving any traces of their presence behind. If you force quit Photoshop, then it is most likely that you have many temporary files stored on your PC.
Photoshop doesn’t have the ability to close projects, as soon as you quit it. This is the reason why it keeps files stored in the system, but some of the reasons that can cause this error are as follows:
- There is not much space in the drive, where the scratch disk is
- The partition of the scratch disk is used fully by Photoshop
- There is limited RAM allocated to Photoshop
Scratch Disks Is Full
So, what do you do when you find out that the scratch disks are full? You need to clear them, using the following instructions:
Photoshop Cache
The user can delete the Photoshop cache, to make space in the scratch disk. This is a built-in solution if you want to delete a specific Photoshop cache:
- Enter Photoshop in Mac, and click on the Edit button
- Hover the mouse to ‘purge’, and it will show you 4 options; undo, clipboard, histories and all
- If an item is grey, then that means there is no cache there
- Select the item that you want to delete, or select all if you are not aiming for something specific
- This process cannot be undone, so make sure that you save the projects that you need and then confirm this action
If you don’t want Photoshop cache to keep on piling up, then it is best to run disk cleanups every day. For this, you can download the CleanMyMac X tool, and clean the junk files after scanning the system.
It also makes sense that to clear scratch disk photoshop windows 10 and others such as mac, and macOS.
Temporary Files
Temporary files can easily take up space on your scratch disk and are one of the most common culprits.
- If you want to find these files on your PC, then look for the extension .pst followed by a list of numbers and then .tmp.
- You can search the scratch drive for these files, but know that it takes time to look for them.
- Make sure that each Photoshop project is properly saved, before deleting these files.
Disk Space
- If there are no other drives on your computer and you don’t want to buy another one, then clean the disk space.
- Look at the contents of the drive, and make sure to delete anything that you don’t need.
There are always some old files stored on the drive that you can delete, and this will free some space. If there are some heavy files on the system, then you can store them on the cloud or Dropbox. So resolve clear scratch disk premiere pro with alternate also.
Change the Scratch Disk
The last thing you can do is change the scratch disk.
- In case the files on your current disk are of utmost importance, and you can’t delete them, then buying a new disk is the only solution.
- If you already have a scratch disk on the PC, then you can change the location from Photoshop, by pressing Command+Option together.
The user can also buy a new SSD so that they don’t have to clear much space by deleting files or clearing scratch disk.
Users should always keep check of how much space is available on their disk, and how much space Photoshop is using.
- The 15% rule implies that it is best to leave enough room for the Photoshop files.
- When a loud noise comes from the CPU, then it means the CPU is overload and has exceeded its carrying capacity.
The methods mentioned above are most likely to solve the scratch disk problem.
Read more: How To Remove A Device From iCloud?
