Brennan’s Blog

Computers are complicated. For so long now people have focused on the processor as the single most important performance driver with a computer. Occasionally people look at memory and bump it up. But the unknown killer of performance is the speed of the hard drive.

My home PC has a pretty good hard drive. It is a normal 7200 drive, but I made sure it has an 8mb cache. That speeds things up nicely over the same speed drive with only a 2mb cache. The other night when I installed Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server onto it I was done within an hour. On a typical computer at work it takes 2 to 4 hours. Installing all of the tools can take the whole day.

Today I am on a stock Dell system and it is taking forever. I can hear the fan speed up and drop off over and over and the little green light keeps blinking at me. I checked and found it is running a WD Caviar from Western Digital. It is running at 7200rpm but only has a 2mb cache.

Think of it this way. If you were going to move a house full of boxes 15 miles to another house, would you prefer a pickup and make 15 runs or a rented UHaul truck and make 2 runs? The same is true for pushing data around with a hard drive. If you are a developer and need speed, request a 7200 speed drive with at least 8mb cache.