SSD drives and Visual Studio IDE. Big improvements? Real usage stories, no theory

Question

I want to go for Windows 7 + Intel SSD drives to speed up my Visual Studio 2008 development cycle.

The areas I want to speed up are:

• Compile/

Answer 1

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.)