What disk layout works fastest for Visual Studio development?

Question

So my laptop hard drive reported a bad cluster last week, which is never a good sign.

I'm going to be shopping for a hard disk, and I may as well plump for the upgrade to Windows 7, which means a reinstallation of Visual Studio and everything else.

This particular laptop has space for two hard disks, so I was thinking about an SSD drive in one and a larger fastish (7.2k) drive in the other.

Where should Visual Studio best go in this arrangement? And what about "special" folders like %TEMP%? Does it make sense to use a ReadyBoost USB stick when your pagefile is already on an SSD? Should the database server and files live on the hard drive? Should I get concerned about the SSD wearing out?

Thanks all...

Answer 1

Do you have an Antivirus with on-access scans activated? If yes, deactivate it for the directory the compiler is installed and the source code, maybe also other areas (have a look at the on-access-scan stats during compilation). That was the main slow-down on my laptop.

Also a bit more RAM might help better also.

I had a look at the exorbitant prices of SSD. I would think twice before investing a big amount in money in something that might not help in the end (that's why you asked the question here, right? ;-) )

If you really need speed, I would buy a desktop and setup a raid-0 partition. Laptops are quite slow. Of course only if you can accept the drawback in mobility...

Answer 2

I would put OS and Apps on the SSD, lots of reading, little writing. And then put data on the other.

Answer 3

Visual Studio intensively uses disk while compiling. Putting temp and project folders on high performance disk can speed up compiling very much.

My opinion is based on tests using ramdisk.

Answer 4

Make sure you have 2GB+ of RAM. The more the better, as Win7 will use any spare RAM as a disk cache which will probably negate most of the advantage of an SSD. (We have a solution that took 6 minutes to load the first time in VS2005, and 20 seconds thereafter, due to the disk cache).

If you have enough RAM, stick your temp & intermediate folders in a RAMdisk.

Then split your remaining files over the two drives (e.g. apps and pagefile on one, source/object files on the other) to spread the I/O load across both drives. If using SSD, try to use it as a read-only device as much as possible.