After searching on the internet for performance improvements when using Visual Studio 2010 with a solid state hard drive, I heard a lot of different opinions.
A lot of people said that there isn't really a benefit when using a SSD, but in contrast others said the exact opposite. I am a bit confused with the contrasting opinions and I cannot really make a decision whether buying a SSD would make a difference.
What are your experiences with this issue and which SSD did you use?
I think a lot of it comes down to what languages you're planning on programming in on VS2010.
For example I know that on fast machines, C# compiles in under 5 seconds on a relatively large project.
On the other hand, programming Native C++, takes ~45 seconds for a project of the same size.
In my own experience, for compile times I don't think an SSD will make much of a difference.
That being said, the launch time of VS2010 on your computer will definitely be shorter than using a conventional hard drive if you use an SSD, but whether that's worth it or not to you is your choice.
Hope that helps.
EDIT: I may be able to play around with this today if anyone is interested. I own an OCZ Vertex 3 120GB, I can install Visual Studio on it and give you a rough estimate in comparison to my work PC, which is roughly equivalent PC specs. I'll make a copy of my project and hope that I can have it compile at home. I will update you sometime later today
I upgraded my computer a few months ago, and decided to test c++ build times before and after to see what sort of speed improvement I got. I tested three configurations, all building a C++ project in Visual Studio 2005 with Windows 7:
I did each build twice, one right after a warm boot, and again just after the first build (once everything had been swapped in to the disk cache). Here are the results I got:
In cases 1 and 2 you’ll note that I got exactly the same build times, regardless of whether I was building from my SSD, or the 7.2k RPM drive. So disk speed appears to not be a factor in compiling, at least for hard disks of a decent speed. The change that made the huge difference was going from a core 2 duo to a i5 3.3ghz CPU – so it appears that compilation is CPU bound, and not memory- or disk-bound.
I had been assuming that going from hard disk to SSD would increase speed a bit, but apparently that’s not the case – presumably everything just gets swapped in and after that goes at the speed of memory.
I think it makes a huge difference. VS (like windows) is constantly writing to the disk. This is surprising slow, even for small amounts of data. I put a SSD in an old laptop and it made it about 5 times faster. You can see the results.
Although I don't have any first-hand experience with VS and SSD's, I am sure it will make everything much faster.
One thing to be aware of: SSD's have very high failure rates (including the first one I purchased). Buy one that is highly rated such as this one. Also, you don't need a particularly large SSD. Just big enough to hold the OS, program files and your project with at least 20% free is fine. So perhaps 128GB.
Visual Studio is sensitive to disk speed, but if you use TFS you're far more at the mercy of the speed of the TFS server and the network (since opening files and the initial modification requires a fetch and checkout).
If you use a DVCS, then target SSD -> CPU frequency. Visual Studio is somewhat sensitive to CPU speed, and doesn't seem to be highly threaded. Prefer fewer faster cores over more slower cores. It doesn't seem to use much more than 1.5GB of RAM without running into OOM exceptions, so don't bother with shoving your machine full of more than 4GB of RAM. If you are lucky enough to have over 4GB of RAM, use the extra as a RAM drive to store your source code in (draconian backup measures necessary). Nothing can yet touch the speed of a RAM drive. Here's a benchmark from my workstation:
