Does anyone know of a way to tell Adobe applications not to poll for specific drives?
Probably not but thought I would ask anyway. I’m reasonably sure the Adobe applications use an API function to get a list of drives and Vista will access all of the drives to make sure they are still on-line before returning the list –which will cause the sleeping drives to wakeup.
I ask on the chance I missed something because my two MyBook Studio Edition II raid drives (attached to an IEEE 1394b Firewire 800 port) take rather a long time to come on-line from sleep, which causes Photoshop to take rather a long time to load.
Note that opening Bridge does not cause the MyBook drives to wakeup.
I can turn these drives off during the day but the chances I will forget to turn them on again when I close-up shop for the evening is fairly good –and that will result in a missed 5:00AM scheduled backup.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Hm... On my Vista x64 system I don't see the blue lights on my MyBook flash back and forth when starting Photoshop. I think that means the drive is not accessed. Photoshop starts up in about 6 seconds. My drive is attached via USB.
I don't believe I've done anything special to exclude drive E: other than ensure it's not checked (as a scratch device) in Edit - Preferences - Performance.
Jerry, I see you are running on a Mac, I’m on a Vista 64 PC, don’t know if that makes a difference but it might as I’m sure PS uses API calls to get drive information.
The first thing I did was setup the scratch drive for all Adobe applications that use one. I have a small WD Raptor SATA that is dedicated to being a scratch drive for Adobe and set it up that way in PS as shown below…
Also, the only way I can tell whether PS 32 or PS 64 is open is to check which of the filters are available – the Help does not say.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
What Jerry has written is an expansion of what I wrote as well. It sounds as though you have things set up properly, Mark, though I can't see your screen shot image to be sure.
As I have verified that CS4 does not access the external drive on my Vista system during startup, it's clear yours is doing something extra...
1. Are you sure you have no software components of your system or Photoshop installed on the external drive? For example, extra plugins directory, etc.
2. Do you have your antivirus software (if any) configured to avoid accessing the external drive?
Noel, the only software that puts anything on either of the MyBook drives is the Vista Backup and Restore application that comes with Vista OS (Ultimate 64 in this case). One of the MyBook drives is used for an image backup and the other is used for file backups (automatic, each night).
These are ‘green’ drives so they go to sleep after a short time of inactivity, I could change that but I’d rather not. Unfortunately Vista itself will periodically access the drives during the day –I don’t know why. Maybe I should set them to never sleep –it is my understanding that startup/shutdown stresses hard drives more than running them all the time, for a while even IBM was rating the MTBF of their drives in terms of on/off cycles, not up time.
However it is not just coincidence that they start up when PS is opened, they do it every time and sometimes they start up when Bridge is opened but not all the time.
Concerning the screen shot… I see it in my post just fine. Would it be better to put it in as an attachment as Jerry did?
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Had a couple of rounds with WD tech support today …I'm not a happy camper.
First guy wanted me to reinstall SP4 to my XP notebook …maybe Microsoft has an SP4 for XP in India but not here in the USA. Then he told me to update the firmware using the download on their web site even though the drives are brand new.
Well, that did not work. The firmware upgrade software for XP did not see the MyBook drive but XP sure did. The software for Mac OS did not see the MyBook either but the Mac sure did. I carefully followed their instructions several times, the list is long. A lot of time wasted for nothing.
In the end I wrote a little process that will write to the drive every so often …simply reading from the drive did not work, the drives buffer a lot data and simply pass it back if it is in the buffer and do not spin up the disks. I have set the write interval to 4 minutes as one of the drives was going to sleep when set to 5 minutes.
I noticed others on the web have the same issue with these MyBook drives and PS but nobody seems to have a good solution.
White Balance so easy, even our 5 year old can do it.- Melissa Strickland
Linear Mode
