If you wish to empty Photoshop's scratch disk, you should start by clearing the cache.
8 Ways To Clear Your Scratch Disk Clear Photoshop Cache This can result in errors saying that your scratch disk is full. Your boot drive may acquire temporary files from a variety of programs on your PC over time, as most of them will utilise it in some way. Photoshop's scratch disk is set to be your boot drive by default. This virtual hard drive takes advantage of the storage on your computer (HDD or SSD) to keep files that cannot fit in or are not required to be in RAM.
When Photoshop is running, it uses a local drive as a scratch disk.
If you have received a message that your scratch disk is full, here's what you need to know to fix it.