Unscientific SSD build time comparison
February 16, 2009
A few days ago I mentioned that I’ve been using an SSD drive in my desktop workstation at home, with pretty great success. The Intel X25-M is where it is at – give it another half year for the prices to become reasonable and I bet you’ll see more folks adopting it.
Eric Hexter was wondering if I could figure out any build time differences, and so what I did was download the Silverlight Toolkit source code from http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight/ and build on a few different systems.
This isn’t scientific, but the machines were all similar enough (Core 2 Duo or Quad Core; building on a single core only, not a parallelized build) that I feel OK at least sharing the numbers I received in a single build attempt.
| 7200rpm | 10000rpm Raptor | Intel X25-M SSD | |
| Clean Toolkit build | 3:23.11 | 2:41.22 | 1:44.97 |
Not conclusively awesome; a lot of the build time is actually spent performing code analysis, and so your own build might be more or less disk read dependent.