SSD drives and Visual Studio IDE. Big improvements? Real usage stories, no theory

user_44894 0
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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...

visual-studio-2008
8 Answers

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.

user_593010
user_32250

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 7200 RPM hard disk drive for an SSD. At once Visual Studio (especially starting/debugging ASP.NET) was at least two times as fast!

user_448940

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

I then started running into problems when doing Subversion updates, and decided to scrap the ReadyBoost idea, and mount the SD drive on a mount point where I then created all my project files. The SD card is not very big (1 GB), 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 Visual Studio 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 hard disk drive, and I have not been able to make up my mind between an SDD and a 7200 RPM laptop drive.

user_292870
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