Solid state drive for development
After six months of complaining about the frustrations of dealing with a slow development environment, I was finally given a Samsung 830 Series SSD.
What a huge difference. My old machine would take approximately 10 minutes from a cold boot to being in a usable state. With the new SSD, it takes less than 20 seconds. Every application I launch is a second or a few seconds quicker, resulting in plenty of gain throughout the day. The experience for nearly all of the disk IO-bound operations I do on a daily basis (log analysis, multitasking, etc…) have improved dramatically.
Compilation of a medium sized solution dropped from 32 seconds to 10 seconds! From all the reviews that I’ve read so far, most people don’t notice a dramatic difference in compilation speeds when they switched to a SSD. I’m not sure why there was such a dramatic difference in my case, but I would have to assume it’s because of all the background services (e.g., antivirus) that are slowing down the build process.
Not only does having a SSD eliminate a lot of time I’d otherwise be wasting waiting for an application to finish, but it’s so much more pleasant to use. I’m no longer losing my focus or train of thought if an operation takes too long. The small interruptions throughout the day due to a slow drive are gone.
Is a SSD a worthwhile investment? Absolutely.
