Scratch disks

From Peyton Hall Documentation

Scratch disks are usually smaller (but sometimes quite large) drives where you can temporarily store data that does not need to be backed up. They may be used for intermediate stages in a data pipeline, a local copy of a dataset available elsewhere or on a non-online media (CD, DLT, DVD), or temporary storage for outputs of your work. Scratch disks are not backed up at all, though some of them are larger RAID5 disk systems which are more fault-tolerant than a single disk on a workstation. They are usually NFS mounted across all machines in the building for easy access.