SSD drives and visual studio IDE. Big improvements ? Real usage stories, no theory

Question

Hello I want to go for Windows 7 + Intel SSD drives to speed up my VS 2008 development cycle.

The areas I want to speed up are:

• Compile/build times
• Openening files for winforms/webforms
• General VS "sluggishnes" for windows and web

I'm not interested in the startup time of VS.
Also cost per GB is not an issue. I want speed.

Has anyone tried this (SSD drive + VS) already and what can you tell about the speedups/downs?
I know the theory about SSD's but usually the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
So I'm interested in people that actually tried and tested a VS setup with SSD..

Answer 1

See Joel's article http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/27.html

Answer 2

Hi

I have also been considering this, and a while back I bought a quick SD disk, that I can stick in the laptop and forget about it, so that Windows Vista can use the ready boost feauture. That feels like it makes a difference, but certainly not enough to warrant buying a SSD drive just for that.

I then started running into problems when doing svn updates, and decided to scrap the ready boost idea, and mount the SD drive on a mount point where I then created all my project files. The SD is not very big (1gb) but it has certainly reduced my wait time for builds and makes debugging a fair bit faster.

Most of this is subjective and I am answering a question that wants facts, with 'I feel this' and 'I feel that'. Because of my experimentation with running VS files from a different drive, I certainly believe it will make a difference, how much, and how much I am willing to pay for that is a question I am also keenly looking for a answer. My notebook can take another hdd, and I have not been able to make up my mind between a SDD and a 7200 rpm laptop drive.

Best Regards Rihan

Answer 3

I've got hard data for Visual C# 2008. The short version is that you are best of spending your money on a faster CPU than faster IO. Longer answer follows...

Our C# (.NET 3.5) solution contains 81 projects with over 2M lines of code (including comments and blank lines). A couple of years ago we upgraded from Pentium 4 3GHz PCs with standard HDDs to Core 2 Duo 2.6GHz PCs with 10,000RPM WD Raptor HDDs (74GB). The speedup was immense. About 10 minutes down to 3.5 minutes. All of this in in a Windows XP Pro 32-bit environment with 4GB of RAM.

We also got one Gigabyte i-RAM (google it for info), which is basically a RAM hard disk with battery backup. Unlike an SSD which is fast for reading but slower for writing, the i-RAM is fast for both, but if you lose power then the battery only lasts for about 12 hours so you have to be disciplined with your check ins. This shaved another minute off the compile times on the Core 2 Dou platform (down to 2.5 minutes) compared to the 10,000 RPM Raptor HDD.

I've since discovered that those old 74GB 10,000 RPM Raptor drives are slightly slower than your garden variety 7,200 RPM modern drive and we've proven that consistently benchmarking compiles. We haven't tried the new Velociraptors but they would certainly be quicker but probably not enough to be worth it for compile times alone.

Last week we got a new Intel Core i7-870 platform with a G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD (with the Indilix Barefoot controller) and a standard 500GB HDD as the second drive. I also chucked the i-RAM into this PC and tested all configurations.

Compared to the Core 2 Duo, which compiled in 3.5 minutes for HDD and 2.5 minutes for the i-RAM, the i7-870 compiles in 1 min 40 seconds for the SSD, HDD and i-RAM give or take 3 seconds.

So both times we've upgraded developer workstations, the vast majority of performance improvement in C# compile times has come from faster the CPU rather than faster disk. If you want to speed up compile times, put your money into the CPU rather than the disk.

That said, the SSD is much faster for loading VS and opening a solution (although I haven't got timings for that). If you can afford an SSD you'll never go back as every program on your PC loads so much faster it is incredible. But it won't significantly speed up your compiles. And that's with VS C# being single-threaded. If MS ever got their act together and made their compiler in the IDE multi-threaded then we could actually use those 4 cores...

Answer 4

When I bought a new computer I was not sure what was the thing that made my experience faster.
However a collegue of mine changed a 7200rpm HD for an SSD.

At once Visual Studio (esp. starting/debugging ASP.NET) was at least 2x as fast!

Answer 5

I just bought one and the only regret I have is not buying an SSD any earlier.

Compilation times have been ok before already, but now the whole IDE is much more responsive. And it's not only Visual Studio, but also other applications. It's just so much easier to stay in flow when the whole system works this quickly.