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I know the topic has been discussed to death in the early days of SSDs and I know that some tests have shown back then that you'd be better off upgrading your CPU than your HDD (mostly due to random write performance). UPDATE Refer this 1 year old community wiki question.

Now though, with cheap drives like the Corsair Force F40 offering good all round performance, has anyone made the step from old-ish HDD to new SSD?

My gut tells me upgrading my core system (Motherboard + CPU) will be much more expensive and the gains won't be the halving of build times, but I can't find any substantiated testimony on the internet about new SSDs + Visual Studio build times on slightly older systems.

UPDATE My system specs for reference: Core 2 Duo 2.8Ghz, 4GB Ram

UPDATE 2 Refer this blog post where older SSDs were tested and didn't improve compile times.

Community
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Andre Luus
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    "I know that some tests have shown back then that you'd be better off upgrading your CPU than your HDD (mostly due to random write performance)." - do you have any refs for that? – Mitch Wheat Nov 08 '10 at 09:40
  • Mitch, no problem. I've updated my post. – Andre Luus Nov 08 '10 at 09:53
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    Nothing has changed, compilation is still an integer problem. – Hans Passant Nov 08 '10 at 10:59
  • Hans, would you please post an answer and explain your position? – Andre Luus Nov 09 '10 at 07:02
  • You can also tree ReadyBoost with a USB-stick, which is way cheaper than an SSD. Access times are pretty much in the same catergory, and since source files are typically relatively small, you don't need to worry about bandwidth so much. – ltjax Mar 02 '11 at 23:08

4 Answers4

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(In general, assuming the drive isn't junk) If you're on Windows 7 and the SSD supports trim, the SSD will speed things up. Otherwise (without trim/Win7) you'll have to manually do the trim process to get speed back up. Trim is, AFAIK, only supported on Win7. See here or here for a good explanation of why it is important.

I built several machines for people in the financial industry using, I think. Crucial 256MB drives and as long as they ran the trim app regularly the drives were MUCH faster overall for a load that's similar to compiling.

JimR
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  • Don't the improved controllers on new SSDs alleviate the need to use the "TRIM" command? – Andre Luus Nov 09 '10 at 06:47
  • @Andre Luus Not that I'm aware of (yet). So far, only the filesystem has been aware of what is free and what is in use. Trim helps alleviate the problem where a file is deleted and the pointer to its chain of blocks is zeroed but the blocks themselves are not marked as free. It *may* be possible for trim to be automatic with NTFS but I am not sure. – JimR Nov 09 '10 at 07:28
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I have a S.Skill Pheonix Pro SSD in my home PC and Visual 2010 w/ReSharper 5 is actually fast. My work machine (i7, 8GB ram) with velociraptor platter drive pales in comparison. It's actually very "laggy"/frustrating. The next gen SSDs are just about to hit us...I can't recommend the upgrade enough. Save some $ on the CPU and spend it on an SSD if you want responsiveness. Get the CPU if you encode video all day.

soslo
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I too have an SSD (both at work and at home), and the responsiveness of both Windows and VS is much improved.

I'd definitely recommend one to a power user just for the boot speed and app launch speed, but it doesn't save any time on compilation that I've noticed.

Dan Puzey
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I upgraded to an Intel X-25 SSD a little less than a year ago on a ~2-year-old laptop running 32-bit XP. Installing VS2010 used to be a multi-hour process; SSD brought it down to ~30 minutes. Going from powered off to productively developing used to take 5-15 minutes; SSD brought it down under a minute. I can't say much about compile time changes, but overall responsiveness with the SSD is incredible.

Paul Karlin
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