Are SSDs worthwhile for software development? [closed]

Solution 1:

From what I've experienced - YES. They are definitely worth the price for blazingly fast read speed during a large project compile.

Solution 2:

If you are like me and you are constantly opening and closing apps, specially apps like IDEs with large projects you will quickly benefit from the performance of an SSD. I just bought a Sandforce-based SSD (285mB/s read and 275mB/s write) and I'm really enjoying it. MacOSX boots in under 20sec and native apps open instantly, including Mail.app and other crappy software like Photoshop or Word. Git is faster checking out branches and well... everything feels faster.

If you are getting one just make sure you get one with a Sandforce controller. They specially work better on OSX (due OSX does not support TRIM and have garbage collector).

Solution 3:

I am also a software developer and I recently added an ExpressCard SSD as the boot drive in my MacBook Pro. It has improved the performance of everything.

Solution 4:

Short answer - it's worth it.

Long answer - I'm a software developer who has a SSD in every machine, and yes, it's worth it because it makes your machine much more responsive.

Your compile times probably won't decrease, however, as that's almost always a CPU-bound process and not a disk-bound process.

You may be thinking, "But doesn't my build process involve a zillion small files? Isn't that where SSDs shine?"

A modern OS like OSX is pretty smart about caching small, frequently-used files in memory. If you're accessing the same small files over and over (a typical pattern when you're dealing with eg. a large software project) these will be pretty efficiently cached into memory by the OS. This, combined with the CPU-intensive nature of compilation, is why compile times are typically not limited by disk speed.