dotneat.net

(updated 22 dec 07)

After reading some blog posts like this I decide to test on my computers how important is hard disk speed in order to increase your productivity when compiling Visual Studio solutions with more than a few project.

I also wanted to see the gain if I placed my solution (more than 25 projects) in a RAM drive disk instead of the hard disk (be sure you backup frecuently if you do that, or get one of this things to avoid data lost).

In order to create a RAM drive, I download the trial version of Virtual Hard Drive Pro
 from FarStone.

There are the results:

1. Environment hardware information

My desktop:

1. CPU: AMD Sempron, 1800 MHz
2. RAM: 2 x (1 Gb Kingston)
3. Hard disks (2):
1. System: ATA-100 40 Gb Barracuda 7200 rpm. Average seek: 8.5 ms. Buffer size: 2Mb. Average read speed: 40 Mb/second (*).
   
2. Data and code: SATA 200 Gb Barracuda 7200 rpm. Average seek: 8.5 ms. Buffer size: 8 Mb. Average read speed: 50 Mb/second (*).
4. RAM drive speed (read): 900 Mb/sec
   

My laptop (Toshiba Satellite Pro M70):

1. CPU: Intel Pentium Celeron 1.73 Ghz
   
2. RAM: 2 x (512 Mb Toshiba)
3. Hard disk (1) : Toshiba 5400 rpm. Average read speed: 30 Mb/second (*)
4. RAM drive speed (read): 1500 Mb/sec

* (Hard disk speed tests have been done with HD_Speed from www.steelbytes.com)

2. The Microsoft Visual Studio solution

A Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 solution with 26 projects (Windows Forms and Windows library projects mainly), in C#.

3. Results

Compilation:

Desktop machine:

a) Compilation on hard disk (no RAM Drive installed yet): 72 seconds*
b) Compilation on a 500 MB RAM Drive : 71 seconds*

Laptop machine:

a) Compilation on hard disk (no RAM Drive installed yet): 65 seconds*
b) Compilation on a 400 MB RAM Drive : 32 seconds*

*(average of three compilations)

4. Conclusions:

Seems like my desktop doesn't have much processor power, and the bottleneck is mainly on the CPU, since there is not much different results on readig from a 50 Mb/seconds hard disk or from a 900 MB/second one (the RAM Drive)

My laptop, instead has a slower disk drive but more processor power, so there is a lot of difference between compiling from hard disk and RAM drive. (it took half the time on the RAM disk - also RAM disk read speed is higher than in the desktop)

I still will do more tests with some other combinations of CPU and hard disk..

Feel free to do the above tests yourself and share the results.

Updated:

• 22 dic 07: Added test with laptop. Desktop tests done again.