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Visual Studio installs the core product and includes files that are specific to this version of Visual Studio. If your system drive is a solid-state drive (SSD), we recommend that you accept the default location on your system drive.
If you install VS on the SSD, it will load and be ready to work much faster. This will probably lead to faster build times.
I would suggest you install Visual Studio 2017 on SSD (takes from 600MB to 83GB full, but you don't need to install every component). However for your projects you may need to use the HDD.
SSDs' superior data transfer speed can save you minutes of waiting. Faster load times. The most dramatic difference between SSDs and HDDs is the time you'll spend waiting for games to load. The benefit is clear: SSDs can save you a few minutes of loading time in every play session and hours of waiting in the long term.
I've got hard data for Visual C# 2008. The short version is that you are best of spending your money on a faster CPU than faster I/O. Longer answer follows...
Our C# (.NET 3.5) solution contains 81 projects with over 2M lines of code (including comments and blank lines). A couple of years ago we upgraded from Pentium 4 3 GHz PCs with standard HDDs to Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz PCs with 10,000 RPM WD Raptor HDDs (74 GB). The speedup was immense. About 10 minutes down to 3.5 minutes. All of this in in a Windows XP Pro 32-bit environment with 4 GB of RAM.
We also got one Gigabyte i-RAM (google it for information), which is basically a RAM hard disk with battery backup. Unlike an SSD which is fast for reading but slower for writing, the i-RAM is fast for both, but if you lose power then the battery only lasts for about 12 hours so you have to be disciplined with your check ins. This shaved another minute off the compile times on the Core 2 Dou platform (down to 2.5 minutes) compared to the 10,000 RPM Raptor HDD.
I've since discovered that those old 74 GB 10,000 RPM Raptor drives are slightly slower than your garden variety 7,200 RPM modern drive and we've proven that consistently benchmarking compiles. We haven't tried the new Velociraptors, but they would certainly be quicker but probably not enough to be worth it for compile times alone.
Last week we got a new Intel Core i7-870 platform with a G.Skill Falcon 128 GB SSD (with the Indilix Barefoot controller) and a standard 500 GB HDD as the second drive. I also chucked the i-RAM into this PC and tested all configurations.
Compared to the Core 2 Duo, which compiled in 3.5 minutes for HDD and 2.5 minutes for the i-RAM, the i7-870 compiles in 1 min 40 seconds for the SSD, HDD and i-RAM give or take 3 seconds.
So both times we've upgraded developer workstations, the vast majority of performance improvement in C# compile times has come from faster the CPU rather than faster disk. If you want to speed up compile times, put your money into the CPU rather than the disk.
That said, the SSD is much faster for loading Visual Studio and opening a solution (although I haven't got timings for that). If you can afford an SSD you'll never go back as every program on your PC loads so much faster it is incredible. But it won't significantly speed up your compiles. And that's with Visual Studio C# being single-threaded. If Microsoft ever got their act together and made their compiler in the IDE multi-threaded then we could actually use those four cores...
Update May 2012: We've now upgraded our PCs again and based on what we learned before we focused on CPU performance. The new PCs have Intel Core i7-2600k CPUs overclocked to 4.6 GHz, with Intel 510 Series 120 GB SATA III SSD, 16 GB RAM and a large CPU cooler! Surprisingly this nearly halved the compilation time, and I certainly put this down to the very large increase in CPU horsepower rather than the faster SSD.
C# compilation in Visual Studio 2010 performance results were:
I just bought one and the only regret I have is not buying an SSD any earlier.
Compilation times have been ok before already, but now the whole IDE is much more responsive. And it's not only Visual Studio, but also other applications. It's just so much easier to stay in flow when the whole system works this quickly.
As a test, we just ordered a 90 GB Sandforce based SSD to see if it could help our build times. We have a large, C++ project that takes 21 minutes to do a complete rebuild on (an older Xeon 3.4 GHz box.)
Running three tests on each, the time difference in builds was negligible; on the order of 30 seconds faster.
Our newer(!) Xeon 5150 box (with harddisk) rebuilds the same project in ~11 minutes, which goes to show that compiling really is CPU bound.
(This surprised me since I figured the awesome 4k and 512k read/write performance of an SSD would be super beneficial in builds.)
After long performance tests I got the best setup here, but for a C++ compiler. You will need:
This setup outperforms any other combination I've tested.
A typical compilation of a huge modular project will have the following results:
My conclusions are the following:
I hope I could help you.
I just upgraded a laptop to SSD by cloning the original 5400 RPM hard drive (surprisingly a painless process). I used a stopwatch to capture before and after metrics. (Dell Inspiron 1525, 3 GB of RAM, Windows Vista 32-bit)
63 seconds --> 52 seconds
In other words, the time from clicking on the .sln file to when Visual Studio is fully loaded and you can begin coding. I performed this once before taking measurements because the first time always takes longer than subsequent times.
16 seconds --> 8 seconds.
F5 to the home page fully loaded.
5 seconds --> 3.5 seconds
See Joel Spolsky's article Solid State Disks (2009-03-27).
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