Question

So my laptop hard drive reported a bad cluster last week, which is never a good sign.

I m going to be shopping for a hard disk, and I may as well plump for the upgrade to Windows 7, which means a reinstallation of Visual Studio and everything else.

This particular laptop has space for two hard disks, so I was thinking about an SSD drive in one and a larger fastish (7.2k) drive in the other.

Where should Visual Studio best go in this arrangement? And what about "special" folders like %TEMP%? Does it make sense to use a ReadyBoost USB stick when your pagefile is already on an SSD? Should the database server and files live on the hard drive? Should I get concerned about the SSD wearing out?

Thanks all...

Answer 1

Make sure you have 2GB+ of RAM. The more the better, as Win7 will use any spare RAM as a disk cache which will probably negate most of the advantage of an SSD. (We have a solution that took 6 minutes to load the first time in VS2005, and 20 seconds thereafter, due to the disk cache).

If you have enough RAM, stick your temp & intermediate folders in a RAMdisk.

Then split your remaining files over the two drives (e.g. apps and pagefile on one, source/object files on the other) to spread the I/O load across both drives. If using SSD, try to use it as a read-only device as much as possible.

Answer 2

Do you have an Antivirus with on-access scans activated? If yes, deactivate it for the directory the compiler is installed and the source code, maybe also other areas (have a look at the on-access-scan stats during compilation). That was the main slow-down on my laptop.

Also a bit more RAM might help better also.

I had a look at the exorbitant prices of SSD. I would think twice before investing a big amount in money in something that might not help in the end (that s why you asked the question here, right? ;-) )

If you really need speed, I would buy a desktop and setup a raid-0 partition. Laptops are quite slow. Of course only if you can accept the drawback in mobility...

Answer 3

I would put OS and Apps on the SSD, lots of reading, little writing. And then put data on the other.

Answer 4

Visual Studio intensively uses disk while compiling. Putting temp and project folders on high performance disk can speed up compiling very much.

My opinion is based on tests using ramdisk.

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