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Can SSDs Be Used For Software Development?

Posted by timothy on from the real-world-odds dept.

hackingbear writes "I'm considering buying a current-generation SSD to replace my external hard disk drive for use in my day-to-day software development, especially to boost the IDE's performance. Size is not a great concern: 120GB is enough for me. Price is not much of a concern either, as my boss will pay. I do have concerns on the limitations of write cycles as well as write speeds. As I understand, the current SSDs overcome it by heuristically placing the writes randomly. That would be good enough for regular users, but in software development, one may have to update 10-30% of the source files from Subversion and recompile the whole project, several times a day. I wonder how SSDs will do in this usage pattern. What's your experience developing on SSDs?"

6 of 480 comments (clear)

  1. Best bang for the buck in software development by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Would be 2 overclocked ATI HD4870s in crossfire mode.

    That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

  2. Re:Umm... by Hurricane78 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Python is hard. Let's use Visual Basic.

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
  3. If Cost is no issue... by Anarke_Incarnate · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Then forget the SSD drive, unless you are worried about head crashing during a fall. Get yourself a 4+ bay ESATA enclosure and do a Raid 1+0. You will pin the bus for throughput and have fault tolerance out the wazoo. I would recommend larger drives, simply for the larger outer tracks (Larger, meaning high density, not necessarily greatest total capacity).

  4. Re:Umm... by EQ · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    VB is hard, lets outsource it.

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  5. Re:Umm... by Hurricane78 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I found it to lack very important functionality. Like access control of class functions from other class functions. Or implicit instance variable inside methods. of much other stuff. It really is a language for simple quick scripting. But when you start to do serious work, better use a real programming language like Haskell for high-level, or C for low level stuff.

    And while Ruby is much stronger typed cleaner, and hat a prettier syntax, it's still only a slow scripting language. Or a bad imperative implementation of Haskell/OCaml/Lisp. ^^

    Don't ask about PHP. We keep it in the basement, right next to the mutated guy from the Goonies.

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
  6. Dear /. Admins by koutbo6 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I find the contributions of Anonymous Coward to be most valuable. I can't imagine that anyone exists who thinks otherwise.
    It will be a big lose to /. and certainly to all its users if he were to unbookmark /.
    I for one will unbookmark /. as well should Anonymous Coward disappear, as will probably half the /. population.

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    A very concerned /. user

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