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I wonder which of the pouplar SCM's (especially I am interested in GIT, SVN) is less disk intensive.

The thing is that, I was going to get an SSDisk (SSD) ) and they have limited write cycles. And I was thinking about that SCM's maintain many files and therefore intensive usage of them could lead to shorter lifespan of the disk (:

To my mind GIT is more disk intensive since it maintains full history and jumping from version to version is much easier.

Your thoughts? :D

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Honestly, it's not going to make any noticeable difference to your SSD's lifespan. Choose any DVCS (I prefer Git) because of the productivity gains over centralized version control. – Stephen Jennings May 15 '11 at 7:27
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While Git is working with a full history, it will mainly do read access to compute the differences with said history.

If you are that concerned with write access on a SDD:

  • initialize your DVCS repo on a USB stick
  • save on logoff your current development by making a bundle on your local SSD (only one file is created/updated) in a Dropbox directory.

That way, you would really keep those write operations to a minimum ;)

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Interesting approach :D Thanks! ))) (to be honest, I was going to use external USB Flash drive) – casey_miller May 17 '11 at 5:07
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up vote 2 down vote

As git compresses files on demand (older versions of files not used in head) and stores same hash/content only once, there won't be much waste of space or write/erase cycles in comparison to other systems like svn.

Wear leveling handles block erases quite well, just make sure you have enough space free as spare on your drive.

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