I currently have a laptop with a 5400rpm drive. It has visual studio installed and whilst it's just ok for working on, I've read plenty of places that you can get a pretty nice performance boost from VS just by increasing the drive speed.
I don't have that luxury, but I was wondering if I might be able to get some performance benefit from storing my visual studio projects on an external USB or FireWire drive and loading them from there, rather than from the internal disk?
From some quick data I found it doesn't look like you'll be any better off with a usb 2.0 drive over the internal 5400 rpm hard drive.
internal hard drive performance
however, I think one of the faster firewire drives could help out a bit.
If you are using Windows Vista, you could try using ReadyBoost with a USB flash drive to see if it improves your VisualStudio performance.
Do not have a chance to use 1394 disk, but I know USB external disk is slower than internal disk.
For large file copy, USB disk typically has a around 20MB/s performance and should be worse to handle small files (most files in a vs.net project are small).
I certinly get better performance when burning files to DVD from my external 7200rpm usb 2 drive over my internal 5400rpm drive
The USB disk protocols have terrible performance. I have a 3.5-inch SATA disk that gives me 80MB/s read speeds when mounted through my case. The same disk gives me about 30MB/s when in an external USB enclosure. The limiting factor is the protocol, which can deliver only about half the 480Mb/s you might expect. (I have this from a guy who writes USB stacks for a living.) I'd suggest you borrow a drive and measure to see if you get a noticeable improvement.
A USB drive won't help you since it's slower then an internal drive. If your laptop has an E-Sata port this drive may be useful though. http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_throttle_esata_flash_drive
You might be better off with the internal drive. If you have enough computer memory, the hard drive accesses might be cached in physical memory as opposed to hard disk space.
It may be possible to prevent windows for writing back to the disk to frequently if a file changes, but this might not be safe on a laptop.
If you have parallel build capability, setting the number of parallel processes to 1 + the number of cpu cores will allow the cpu's to be utilized (compiling) while another file is being loaded.
A laptop hard drive replacement is cheap & quick, and with Windows Home Server you can restore a backup to the new drive.
Even if this is for work, I still think it's worth spending my own money to improve my productivity, if my employer won't pay for it. (Or find an employer who will!)
Max out your RAM. This will alleviate some of the load on the hard drive.
Once you have lots of RAM, experiment with disabling virtual memory (aka swap space / aka page file). For certain usage patterns, this can be much faster. For others, it can be slower. For still others, it will crash. Hence, experiment (and save often).
Have you actually checked the prices of 7200RPM laptop drives lately? 160GB, 7200RPM for $60 @ NewEgg.com