up vote 5 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I just got a new box. It has an SSD for the primary drive, and a 1TB SATA for the secondary drive. I'm going to run windows and my binaries on the SSD and keep all my downloads/documents/music/etc on the secondary drive.
My question is should I also keep my Visual Studio Projects and code on the SSD or keep them on the secondary drive? The faster SSD would presumably be better for compiling and indexed searches, but would it be better to keep it on the 2nd drive for a more parallel disk IO situation?

link|improve this question
feedback

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

SSD have a much better IO and therefore it makes sense to have your code on the SSD disk.

link|improve this answer
I know it has better IO, but all the OS and Binaries will be reading from the SSD. I'm not sure if it mightn't be better to let the code files get read in from the secondary in a parallel fashion. – fr0man May 17 '10 at 20:18
@fr0man, doubt it, Christian's simple answer is probably right. It's MUCH faster, so that goes beyond all other concerns. – Yar May 17 '10 at 20:36
The IO with the SSD will be theoretically double what a platter based disk could handle. The SATA bus still wouldn't be your bottleneck in this situation. Go with the SSD, but make sure you have hourly backups. :) – churnd May 17 '10 at 20:37
Thanks everyone, that's what I was wondering. I had heard stories of the SSDs not being THAT much faster than traditional drives. – fr0man May 17 '10 at 20:42
feedback
up vote 4 down vote

It depends on the drive you have. The read is will always lose to the SSD, but maybe not on the write performance. Write performance is going to be important during compilations for creating new executables, assemblies and other build artifacts.

Copy one of your larger solutions to the HD and the SSD and compile both. You'll notice the difference one way or the other and have your decision. My guess is the HD will be faster for compiles/builds but the ssd will win everythig else.

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

I don't know if this is possible in Visual Studio, but the best may be a combination of the two. Put the source code on the SSD, but have the compiled objects written to the HD. This is how we have out make based projects layed out, but for other reasons.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.