Timings using SSD

If you're an ASP.NET developer like myself, you don't want to waste time fiddling with your thumbs while you wait for your compiler to finish its work. We're always on the lookout for things that can help us speed up our work, to give us those extra seconds of performance boost.  And one thing that's been a challenge to us is the fact that our processors may be really fast but the bottleneck kicks in when we are working on a huge project with thousands of files. For additional insight on this, see Scott Guthrie's blog entry ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx )

This is where I thought I would be assisted by that new kid on the block: Solid State Drive. 

I've been intrigued how fast my machine can go in its daily usage if I use this much discussed technology, so I recently bought an Intel X25M 80 GB SSD to satisfy my curiosity. 

Here are some initial timings I got from my experiment. I will be adding some new timings as I got them.

(My machine's specs: Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33GHz, 4 GB Memory, 1 SSD drive, 1 Seagate magnetic drive,  3 USB drives)

1. Complete Windows 7 Installation (starting from the time I clicked on the last button that required my interaction to completion) = 13 minutes

2. The entire Microsoft SQL Server 2005 installation = 6 minutes

3. The entire Visual Studio 2008 suite excluding Visual C++, and Crystal Reports = 16 minutes

Next, I loaded a VS2008 ASP.NET solution containing 8 projects and 5,924 files. Here's what I got:

1. Launching VS 2008 with the Start Page = 10 seconds

2. Opening the solution (without including the loading of the ReSharper cache) = 10 seconds

3. Opening the solution including the loading of the ReSharper cache = 18 seconds

4. Rebuilding the entire solution = 28 seconds

5. Launching the default page of my ASP.NET application in Debug mode = 5 seconds

Aside from the above items, one thing that you'll noticed is that you don't wait for your machine to show the desktop upon logging in: the desktop is waiting for you a split second after you click OK in the login screen. Shutdown is also a lot faster compared with the old spinning drive. Now I don't hate myself for turning off my machine and suddenly realizing I need to turn it on again because I need to copy 1 file that I need to bring to the office on a very hectic day.

All-in-all, I find myself very satisfied with this new toy. I just wish that it's a lot cheaper so I could afford the 160 GB version.

UPDATE:

Here's a screen capture from Soluto, an application that measures boot time: