Compiling code on an external drive

Question

To make things easier when switching between machines (my workstation at the office and my personal laptop) I have thought about trying an external hard drive to store my working directory on. Specifically I am looking at Firewire 800 drives (most are 5400 rpm 8mb cache). What I am wondering is if anyone has experience with doing this with Visual Studio projects and what sort of performance hit they see.

Answer 1

I use vmware and the virtual machines are on an external usb drive. Performance is fine. You might have some issues with the drive name changing - not an issue if you use virtual machines.

Answer 2

Granted I work in an industry were Personal Information and Intellectual Property are king, but I don't like that idea at all. That hard drive disappears and you have a big problem. Why not Remote Desktop into the work machine?

EDIT Stipud Spelingg

Answer 3

It depends on the size of the project. The throughput is low and the latency is high, so you're going to get hit every which way, but due to the latency you'll be hit harder if you have a lot of little files rather than a few large ones.

Have you considered simply carrying around a GIT or other distributed repository and updating the machine repositories as you move around? Then you can compile locally and treat the drive and a roving server. Since only changes will be moved across, it should be faster, and your code will be 'backed up' in more places.

If you forget the drive, it breaks, or is lost/stolen, then you can still sit down at a PC and program with no code missing if you're at the last PC you used, or very little code missing (which will be updated later with a resync anyway).

And it's just a hop skip and a jump away from simply using the network to move the changes between the systems if you don't want to carry the drive around later.