SSD useful for compiling?

[FrameFever]

Is the application of an SSD useful for compiling?
Has anybody some experience with it?

I thinking of buying an SSD, but when there are no benefits in the daily use for a programmer over an normal HDD, I would stick with the HDD.

[Zonder]

yeah they do help compilation times I have found don't have any stats though. You don't necessarily need a huge one either get 2 small ones and stripe them of course you need windows 7 to get best life span from the drive (don't use linux so not sure if they support the delete notifications)

[0xC0DEFACE]

Here at work our rebuild time at one stage was about 8 minutes for release with symbols. After switching moving the project onto my SSD drives build time dropped to about 5 minutes. This is on Windows 7 in Visual Studio using the /MP flag for multi threaded compiling. I think my HDD was dying so it may have been going slower than it should have been. Also an SSD will do nothing to help your link time at all.

Using an SSD the compiler will be able to scan directories faster to find and open needed include files and will be able to save out the generated .obj files faster. Also if you were using /MP before, it could be possible that the multiple build threads were causing the HDD to thrash a little trying to delete and create small files all over the filesystem. Using an SSD virtually eliminates this problem.

Now that I have answered your question in respect to build time let me lay down my opinion on SSD's

HDD to SSD is similar to the jump from Magnetic Tape to Hard Drives; the storage media gets more expensive but read and write speeds shoot through the roof.

IMHO, There is no single more significant system wide performance boost you can give your computer than upgrading from a HDD to a SSD.

HDD for storage.
SSD for OS.

If you have a sweet processor and graphics card you are doing yourself a massive disservice not getting an SSD. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Even now when I navigate to my storage drive and have to wait for it to spin up I get impatient. That 8 seconds is an eternity to an SSD. All boot times, load times and save times will improves along with any situations where the CPU had stalled waiting for the HDD to get around to at some stage finding some data.

And of course the SSD helps me get things done faster because the computer can keep up with you better! As soon as a build time gets over about 20 seconds I feel the need to fill that void with something, reddit.com/r/programming, ogre forums or something, and of course then you spend 4 minutes reading an interesting programming article rather than coding. An SSD can help reduce incidental time wasting by reducing your build time!

If someone told you that "Sure, for everyday usage an HDD is quicke,r but my magnetic tapes are so much more cost effective" I'm sure you would look at that person like they were a fool. That's how I now feel about people saying the same thing about HDD's.

Alright that's enough ranting. I'll just finish by saying that after having an SSD I would never again consider having a HDD for my main drive. Ever.

SSD. Just do it.

[Kojack]

If someone told you that "Sure, for everyday usage an HDD is quicke,r but my magnetic tapes are so much more cost effective" I'm sure you would look at that person like they were a fool. That's how I now feel about people saying the same thing about HDD's.

Cost effective is a valid argument.
My pc has 8TB of hard drives. To recreate that right now using 2TB western digital caviar black sata 3 hard drives (not the cheapest) is about $640au. To do it with the cheapest ssd drives I could find locally (OCZ Vertex 2 240G), it would be $12166au.
Small cost differences, even double or triple the price, no problem. But when it costs 19 times more...
Plus I'd need 33 sata ports in my pc, and a much bigger case (I've only got 15 drive bays).

[0xC0DEFACE]

Cost effective is a valid argument.

Very true, I was mainly talking about for your main drive.

HDD for storage.
SSD for OS.

I'll just finish by saying that after having an SSD I would never again consider having a HDD for my main drive

I have a 128 GB SSD as my main drive with two 2TB HDD's in RAID 1 (for redundancy in case of drive failure) as my storage drive.

Most of the stuff on my main drive is just applications and active projects, and games i'm currently playing, they are the things that need the speed boost. Movies, tv shows, pictures music, application installers and old projects etc, all get sent to the storage drive. No need to waste space on my SSD for that first season of underbelly that ill likely never watch

[syedhs]

I think the best is the 'best of the world' ie marriage between conventional hd and solid state. There exist such harddrive such as Seagate Momentus XT but UNFORTUNATELY..it is defective - at least for my case. I bought one for my laptop, certainly more expensive ~ 1.5 times than conventional harddisk. At first, everything is zippy fast and quiet too - you don't get to listen usual hd cracking noise when it reads/writes. But after a few months, the harddisk problem begin to surface - it seems to pause for 1-2 second every 5 seconds which is very very bad. I read various forums and apply firmware update (Seagate is very aware of this problem) , but it seems that the problem remains. Probably the design itself is defective, because you can see even after Seagate released 3-4 firmware updates solely for this problem, the problem still persist.

Sorry for being a little off, but quite related actually