I recently bought a hybrid 7200rpms, 500GB(4GB SSD) Seagate Momentus XT hard drive to replace my old 7200rpms, 250GB Seagate Momentus. The XT version comes with a integrated 4GB SSD drive, which is used as a “buffer” between the mechanical storage and the SATA interface, meaning that commonly used files are placed on the faster SSD instead of the slower mechanical disk.
Before I replaced the old Momentus disk in my laptop, I used Visual Studio 2008’s compiler to tests the old disk’s performance when compiling one of SKOVs C# solutions. I did the same benchmark afterwards, on my new XT disk, and I did a “rebuild race” against my SKOV developer laptop. The results are as follow:
My Laptop(old disk) vs My Laptop(new disk):
- 1:05 vs 0:44 speedup: 1.47
- 1:02 vs 0:38 speedup: 1.71
SKOV Laptop vs My Laptop(new disk)
- 1:03 vs 0:35 speedup: 1.80
- 0:53 vs 0:38 speedup: 1.39
- 0:55 vs 0:32 speedup: 1.71
Note: I did a clean before each rebuild.
The Seagate Momentus XT delivers a speedup of 39-80% which I think is pretty impressive. Thus, in the worst and best case, the XT decreased the build time by 28% and 44% respectively, which will surely help with my productivity.
If anyone have benchmarking figures when compiling using Visual Studio combined with a high performance SSD, let me know as I am interested in the potential gain of using SSDs.
Misc
Seagate, Benchmark, Visual Studio, XT, Momentus, SSD, Solid State Disk, Performance, compile time