Saturday, February 13, 2010

Solving a mid-life crisis with a Solid State Drive

My development laptop is now 18 months old, which makes it older than me in computer years. As part of a mid-life refresh, I replaced the boot drive, (250gb 7200rpm) with an Intel X25M 160gb ssd.

The result of this is that things are much snappier. How much snappier? I timed a few things of importance to me, booting my laptop and virtual machines, starting delphi and rebuilding a medium sized project (600,000 loc).

Overall, using an ssd cut the times by an average of 39%. Not too bad an improvement. To put it another way, my "getting started" time (boot laptop, boot vm, start delphi) went from 6:05 to 3:37.




Edit:
The Delphi 2007 install is screwed up somewhere. It certainly never used to take 3 minutes to start up:( but sometime last year it started getting really slow. I don't use that install or vm much so I haven't bothered trying to sort it out.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is that left axis seconds? A few minutes to start Delphi 2007? That doesn't seem right. I have a good mix of components and a cold start of 2007 on my 6 year old desktop is maybe 12 seconds. A warm start, 3 secs. (That's with Delphi Speedup of course.)

Sean said...

The left axis is seconds. It took 3 minutes to start D2007 and 1 minute to start D2010.

Those figures have more than halved now.

Anonymous said...

It's me, Anon, again. That startup time for 2007 seems really long. One of the reasons I use Delphi is the fast compile/link times. Could the use of VMWare be causing this?

My main project is about 400,000 lines for a full build (that includes the components I use such as TMS, TChart, etc.) A full "cold" build is usually under 10 secs. Once I start working, a make is maybe 2 secs, tops.

Years ago, I was forced to use various C++ environments. I would age while I waited for makes to complete. I decided I didn't want to live like that and stuck to my guns and continue to use Delphi.

Anonymous said...

Delphi 7 startup would be interested.