How to use external drive for Swap Disk in PS on MAC ?

**Ken Lee** · 23-Sep-2006, 08:23

I have a Maxtor external drive that was originally formatted for Windows, as a FAT 32 drive. Using Photoshop on Windows, I can specify the Maxtor external drive as my swap disk. This gives a performance boost, since 2 drives can operate in parallel, etc.

On the Mac, using the latest version of OS X, I can mount the Maxtor drive, and it works fine for typical usage (reading and writing files). This is because OS X is capable of reading and writing to a variety of disk formats (such as those used by Windows), in addition to its own format.

However, when using Photoshop on the Mac, the Maxtor drive does not appear in the drop-down list of available drives for use as swap drives.

If I were to reformat the Maxtor drive for OS X, would it then become a viable choice for use as a swap drive on the Mac ?

**Tom Westbrook** · 23-Sep-2006, 13:50

Just wondering: what's the connection interface?

**QT Luong** · 23-Sep-2006, 13:53

I am not sure it is a good idea in the first place to use an external for swap. Last I tried, it caused PS to crash.

**Ken Lee** · 23-Sep-2006, 14:27

Originally Posted by Tom Westbrook

Just wondering: what's the connection interface?

The interface is USB.

**Roger Hein** · 23-Sep-2006, 14:44

Ken,

I use an external HD as a PS 'swap' disc. It's connected via firewire (400) to my Mac, a 'slow' Mini. I've experience absolutely no problems/issues whatsoever. FWIW the retouchartist ps test takes 8 min w/o the swap drive and 5m 10s with the swap drive. Yeah, I can hear all those with quad core G5 towers laughing with their under 2min scores. Anyways, it's made my Mini 'liveable' until I buy a new Mac with more horsepower next year when CS3 comes out. Your external maxtor should work fine - just reformat it using Apple's Disk Utility and remount.

**Frank Petronio** · 23-Sep-2006, 15:40

I use an external Firewire HD for swap and it is clearly faster and seems just as reliable as anything else. Just reformat it.

**Ken Lee** · 23-Sep-2006, 21:02

Hey - Fabulous !

I reformatted my Memorex 1 GB USB thumb drive to the standard OS X format, and it can now function as a swap drive. This is really terrific ! I can just imagine what it is like with a faster firewire connection, and a larger drive. The sky's the limit.

Many thanks to you illustrious sages, for your helpful advice !

**JohnnyV** · 25-Sep-2006, 19:42

>Ken Lee wrote: If I were to reformat the Maxtor drive for OS X, would it then become a viable choice for use as a swap drive on the Mac ?

My "educated - cough" guess is format the external hard drive to MS-DOS using Disk Utility to be recognized as a scratch disk on a Mac.

I recently ask a question on the MacFixit forums regarding sharing external hard drives between Mac and Windows.

Received excellent information about formating and software options.

http://www.macfixitforums.com/showfl...c=1&PHPSESSID=

**Marko** · 26-Sep-2006, 09:58

If you plan to use that drive with Mac only, then use Mac OS Extended format.

If you plan to share the same drive between Mac and Windows machine, use FAT (not FAT32), also known as MS-DOS format.

As a side note, there are external enclosures available for housing multiple SATA drives. If you have a desktop Mac and don't mind pulling a cable out, then this might provide the best option, performance wise.

**JW Dewdney** · 29-Sep-2006, 23:56

An external drive is just as good an internal for a scratch disk. The computer really doesn't know the difference unless it's poorly set up. The preferred hardware protocols would be SCSI (LVD) (nets you 60-250mb/sec real-world) or SATA (potentially more in some cases). It is very important to zero the drive first (low-level format it with disk utility) to MacOS (extended works) blocks. You should be very happy with the performance.