When you think about storage upgrades, you probably picture a bigger or faster SSD to replace or add to your existing drive. However, you could also consider adding an SSD as a scratch disk to your PC to improve the performance of certain workloads, and avoid cluttering your main drive. If you work on a lot of creative projects, you'll find that even a small SSD scratch disk can reap significant performance as well as longevity benefits.

What exactly is a "scratch" disk?

Storing your rough work

When programs like Photoshop and Premiere Pro run out of system RAM, they use your primary storage drive as a scratch disk to store temporary files, cache, and other project data. However, you're free to change the location of the scratch disk. This is where a dedicated SSD scratch disk comes in. Even if your primary drive is an NVMe SSD, using a separate SSD as the scratch disk has some perks.

First, the performance is improved since the program isn't using your main SSD to store temp files anymore. The dedicated scratch disk is solely hosting the cache and temp files related to the project data, improving the performance of both Photoshop (or another program) and whatever you're doing on your primary SSD. It also avoids clutter and frees up space on the main SSD.

Lastly, offloading the constant writes needed to handle the project data extends your main SSD's lifespan. And since the dedicated SSD scratch disk is only being used for your creative projects, it also lasts longer. This division of labor is better for both your main drive and the SSD scratch disk.

Your SSD scratch disk can be as cheap as you want

A small investment for big gains

You don't need to spend $100 on a new SSD just to reap the benefits of a dedicated scratch disk. Since you'll only be using it for some of your temporary project data, even a 250GB–500GB drive will be enough. You don't need to spend over $35 to get a decent 500GB Gen4 NVMe drive for "scratching" purposes.

Separating your project data from your OS and game files keeps your primary drive from bloating and slowing down due to insufficient space. Once you designate a small SSD as the scratch disk, you don't have to worry about running out of space on your primary drive, or wonder what's hogging space on your SSD.

Gamers and home labbers can also benefit

Performance and convenience

While storing your games on a separate SSD might not yield much in terms of loading times (unless it's faster than your primary drive), it still offers some convenience. If you end up with a corrupted OS that you need to reinstall, you can format your OS drive without worrying about reinstalling all your games. Besides, some titles can actually write a lot of data to your drive, and storing such games on a separate drive might reduce the wear on your primary drive.

As for home lab users, storing your VM files on your primary SSD can end up in a clash of resources with the host system. Your main drive is always handling tasks like updates, scans, and indexing, and if your VMs are also writing data on the same drive, it can cause occasional slowdowns. Plus, restoring VM snapshots is also a write-heavy process; separating it from the main drive helps keep things snappy.

Home lab users running multiple VMs, hosted services, and containers can benefit hugely from using an SSD scratch disk. All that parallel processing is much better served on a dedicated storage drive, and if it's an SSD, that's even better for performance.

Get scratching with a dedicated SSD

An SSD scratch disk can offer tangible performance benefits for those regularly using Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and other creative applications. Offloading your temporary project data from your primary SSD not only improves performance, but also distributes the wear across your drives, improving longevity. Even gamers can get in on the action — if not for performance, then for convenience.