Unscientific SSD build time comparison

16 February 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.

Jeff Wilcox is a Software Engineer at Microsoft in the Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), helping Microsoft engineers use, contribute to and release open source at scale.

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