Initial tests with a RAMDisk showed a measureable improvement. Further tests show an even bigger improvement.
| Actual | Adjusted | |||
| Hard Disk | RAMDisk | Hard Disk | RAMDisk | |
| Full Solution Rebuild | 1:25 | 0:50 | 1:00 | 0:25 |
| Build and update VSIP Package | 1:00 | 0:30 | 0:40 | 0:10 |
I used two tasks that take a while on my system to perform the measurements. The speed increases however are seen in single project development as well. The actual numbers are the raw measurements. However both tasks have an internal task related to assembly registration which still occurs on the hard drive because it relates to Visual Studio, and Visual Studio still exists on my C drive. The adjusted times show the times minus the time it took to perform that task.
Overall, the performance is 2-4 times faster. Thats very noticable given that these tasks I need to repeat frequently. Tasks that take a long time to complete often cause me to wander to other tasks (eating, facebook, other work) and sometimes not return immediately. So if I can get these tasks down to a speed thats not "boring", then my productivity increases significantly.
In my system I have high speed drives with 32 MB caches, and they are set up in a RAID 0 configuration. This makes my native hard disk results generally more than 2 times faster than the average system. So if we were to adjust the above results for the average setup, a RAMDisk will improve your build times by 4-10 times!