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Will a hybrid hard drive improve Visual Studio compilation time?

I have seen various suggestions that hard drive speed is an important factor in Visual Studio compilation performance.

There is currently a relatively cheap hybrid hard drive called the Seagate Momentus XT .

It has a 7200 rpm 250, 320 or 500 GB hard drive and 4 GB SLC NAND SSD.

Has anyone tried this in their development machine? Has performance improved? What was the improvement factor?

Or is it that a hybrid hard drive cannot optimize the typical use of a compilation hard drive, i.e. performance is not better than a standard hard drive?

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The speed of the hard drive is a significant factor during the initial loading of the project, but for each compilation run after that, a machine with sufficient RAM does not need to touch the hard drive at all - all your source files will be cached by the OS.

Copying libraries and temporary files (.obj) can still be problematic, but SSDs do not help with small files. Moving the obj / directory to a RAM disk can be more efficient (without having to buy new hardware) if I / O is really a problem, but usually it is not.

Check CPU usage at compile time. If it is approaching 100%, an SSD or hybrid drive will not help you at all, you just need a faster processor.

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Here are some real statistics ...

VS2010 master solution file containing more than 120 projects (110 C #, 10+ VB). A mixture of web / class / test projects, etc.

Momentus 7200.3 320GB drive

  • Solution load time = 2min 25sec
  • Solution recovery after clean = 4min 10sec

Momentus XT 500GB Drive

  • Solution Download Time
    • 1st pass = 1 minute 40 seconds
    • 2nd pass = 1min 15sec
  • Solution recovery after cleaning
    • 1st pass = 3min 46sec
    • 2nd pass = 3min 27sec

No more than a 17% improvement in build time and a 50% improvement in VS boot time.

Configuring RAID-0 using 10x Raptor drives provides much better build time improvements, albeit very variable due to lack of redundancy. Sorry, no statistics provided ...

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I think this article describes the performance of SSDs regarding the compilation time you are asking about.

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I would think about this only after you already have enough ram on your computer. Consider putting target files and temporary files on disk if I / O writing is causing a problem (which should not be the case if you have enough bar).

I assume that it is cheaper and probably less destructive (they don’t need to transfer everything to the new HD) in order to buy your team an additional 8 GB of memory for each workstation and configure ramdiscs.

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