Solid-State-Drives for Improved Performance

Question

I feel the need, the need for speed:

I have a 14 MB SSIS package, and every time I run it in debug mode, it takes forever and a half to start executing. Most of the time is spent saving before it runs - If I save the package manually before it runs, it starts up instantly.

Save + Run - 20 seconds

(Presaved) Run - 9 seconds

I'm thinking I reduce my development time by a good chunk of that 11 seconds by using a hybrid Solid State Drive like Jeff recommends here.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-state-hard-drives.html

Does anyone have any good experience with these drives in terms of saving on Compile time?

Do you install your OS on these drives or is this strictly a D drive?

Answer 1

Our team bought Intel X-25M drives a few months ago, and I'd say we're saving 10-15 minutes per day each thanks to them. The drives probably paid for themselves within 2 months.

Most of our time saving was with Subversion updates and commits.

C# compile-times for a pretty large project have gone from maybe 5 seconds to 1 second - I think most of those files were in RAM while working in VS2008, but the difference certainly adds up when running tests every few minutes.

I'd certainly install the OS and commonly used apps on the SSD for quick start-up times. Visual Studio loads in a flash.

Answer 2

I've got a 240GB Corsair Force SSD with Win 7 in my laptop (as the main drive, obviously) and it really shines. Performance with random reads/writes of all sizes is at least 10 times higher than with the previous 500GB hard disk and still several times faster on sequential throughput (up to 270 MB/s).

I've got a large virtual machine that runs a TFS, Sharepoint, two SQL instances, Reportserver, SSAS and Visual Studio. It used to block my entire hard drive for at least 15 minutes on startup due to all the automated jobs running in parallel. With the SSD I can start it up and work with Visual Studio immediately.

So if you think disk is your bottleneck (it mostly is), go for a SSD for everything that is not plain mass storage (like music, backups or video files).

Be careful though as there are large performance differences in todays SSDs. The latest and greatest consumer drives with acceptable prices today use the sandforce 1200 controller.