Scratch Disk for a Laptop

[orkaknos12]

okay so I'm going to have to use a laptop for design for a while: working with a spin off company now across the street - much to my chagrin. I've got a fairly nice laptop 1.6GHZ Turion64, but as usual the HD is only like 4200 RPM and it makes editing in CS2 unbearably unresposive. The company will buy me whatever I need (probably I'd set the budget sub $200). I'd like to come up with a nice way of solving the problem of a seperate scratch disk without resorting to a huge external hard drive. Will a 4GB memory stick do the trick? can I use a network drive - we do have a lot of local fileservers? IPOD Hard disk? What will give me the snappy speed I'm used to in my tower on a Laptop workstation? I have USB, Firewire, a card reader and a PCMCIA slot free. I want to keep it as portable as possible and plugging in an external Hard drive is sort of out of the question because I may not be sitting in one place for long.

-Jon

[orkaknos12]

Just to answer my own question. Flash Cards won't work as a scratch disk. I ended up with an 80 gig bus powered drive ($129), and Photoshops back to it's snappy self. All you have to do is leave the scratch disk on the startup drive and add the new drive as the secondary scratch disk. That way both photshop and illustrator alternate between the fast and slow drives. USB2 is a bit slower than the built in drive, but when you have a 3 gig scratch and the programs running like normal still, you gotta love it. Laptops are work of the devil still when it comes to design.

-Jon