I want to go for Windows 7 + Intel SSD drives to speed up my Visual Studio 2008 development cycle.
The areas I want to speed up are:
- Compile/build times
- Openening files for winforms/webforms
- General Visual Studio "sluggishnes" for Windows and web
I'm not interested in the startup time of Visual Studio. Also cost per GB is not an issue. I want speed.
Has anyone tried this (SSD drive + Visual Studio) already and what can you tell about the speedups/downs?
I know the theory about SSDs but usually the proof of the pudding is in the eating. So I'm interested in people that actually tried and tested a Visual Studio setup with SSD…
Best Answer
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 I/O. 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 3 GHz PCs with standard HDDs to Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz PCs with 10,000 RPM WD Raptor HDDs (74 GB). 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 4 GB of RAM.
We also got one Gigabyte i-RAM (google it for information), 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 74 GB 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 128 GB SSD (with the Indilix Barefoot controller) and a standard 500 GB 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 Visual Studio 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 Visual Studio C# being single-threaded. If Microsoft ever got their act together and made their compiler in the IDE multi-threaded then we could actually use those four cores...
Update May 2012: We've now upgraded our PCs again and based on what we learned before we focused on CPU performance. The new PCs have Intel Core i7-2600k CPUs overclocked to 4.6 GHz, with Intel 510 Series 120 GB SATA III SSD, 16 GB RAM and a large CPU cooler! Surprisingly this nearly halved the compilation time, and I certainly put this down to the very large increase in CPU horsepower rather than the faster SSD.
C# compilation in Visual Studio 2010 performance results were: