The scratch disk in your device is a disk drive that can be utilized for temporary storage while your software such as Photoshop is operating. This is vital for Photoshop as it uses this space to keep important bits of your documents that will not necessarily be a part of the RAM.
This is why most scratch disk files are placed in hidden or invisible OS-specified folders. However, this does not include non-boot volumes on Windows, which is situated at the root directory of your drive.
The reason why this is a vital part of your system is that Photoshop uses this hard drive as its primary scratch disk since this is where the operating system is installed. This brings us to our topic for today; the Photoshop Scratch Disk full error! We will be explaining what this is and how you can fix it.
What is the Photoshop scratch disk full error?
Normally, to avoid any issues and have ample memory, Photoshop keeps around 6 GB of space on your device’s boot drives and around a GB on non-boot drives. This is what ensures your drive doesn’t suffer from running out of space.Learn different ways to block photoshop in firewall if you do not want it to utilize your internet.
However, if you use your Photoshop app a lot, then you will have a lot of saved functions and data. This can take up quite a bit of scratch disk memory.
This is when you will see the warning that reads, “Scratch disks are full” in Photoshop. If this happens, it means your computer does not have an adequate amount of space or memory to store Photoshop files. This can cause your Photoshop to crash. This brings us to our main topic and that is how to fix this Photoshop scratch disk full error.
How to fix Photoshop scratch disk full error?
- Delete Photoshop cache data
As we have mentioned, whenever you edit your images on Photoshop, it makes a cached version of the image it was before the editing. These versions can add onto the memory space and you might see the Photoshop scratch diskss are full error!
However, these cache versions can easily be deleted to fix the scratch disk error but you should make sure you won’t need those older versions later.
- Launch Photoshop on your computer.
- Go to the Edit menu, select Purge, and click on All. This will delete your Photoshop cache files.
- Allow Photoshop to use RAM
You can also fix scratch disk issues in Photoshop by permitting it to use more RAM. Here are the steps:
- Launch Photoshop on your device.
- Choose the Photoshop option then select Preferences, and choose Performance.
- You will see an option that reads, Let Photoshop Use. You can enter the amount of RAM you want it to use and then press OK and you are done!
- Clear memory space on your computer
To fix the scratch disks full error, sometimes all you need to do is delete junk files. clear all the junk files from your computer.
How to see your storage on Windows:
- Go to Settings.
- Choose the System.
- Click on Storage to view the details.
It will show you what is using what amount of memory and you can figure out what to delete.
How to see your storage on Mac
- Select the Apple logo and click on About This Mac.
- Select Storage and click on Manage.
It shows the total amount of space and suggestions that can be freed up.
- Change your scratch disk on startup
In case the previous method didn’t work for you, we would recommend that you change your defined scratch disk on startup. If you’ve associated more than one scratch disks to Photoshop, it becomes much simpler to switch between these when Photoshop starts up.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Open up Photoshop for Windows and make sure you hold won the Alt and Ctrl keys together.
- If you are using Mac OS, you will launch Photoshop and hold down the Command and Option keys at the same time.
- After this, for both OS, you will choose a new scratch disk from the Startup menu and press the option for OK.
- Reset values for Crop Tool
This is another method to fix the Photoshop scratch disk error! It concerns your crop tool in Photoshop. This tool is an excellent way to crop your photos by a size you specify. However, since it is an easy mistake, many times you may select the wrong unit of measurement and in turn, create a cropped image that is much larger than you wanted!
This image might be why the Scratch disks are full error keeps popping up for you in Photoshop. To fix this, you can select the crop tool in Photoshop and remove the specified values in the given boxes. A good tip for future reference is to only use pixels as your unit of size.
- Change scratch disk drive in Photoshop
If none of the methods above worked out for you, then you can opt for this technique instead. This will require that you have more than one driver to use. Since Photoshop will only ever need the system’s operating drive as its scratch disk with multiple drives, you can use Photoshop with them and the scratch disks are full error will subside. Here are the steps you need to follow:
- First, open Photoshop on your device.
- Select the Photoshop menu and proceed to select Preferences from the menu.
- After this, you will click on Performance.
- Then finally, you will first enable and then disable scratch disks.
That has been our in-depth review on how to fix the Photoshop scratch disk error in both Windows and Mac OS. You can easily execute every one of these fixes to solve the scratch disk full error. We hope that our article for today has been insightful and interesting for all our readers.
