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To any development manager who wishes they could offer better hardware within their budget: If you haven't already done this, buy an SSD for every workstation.
by encoderer 15y ago
To any development manager who wishes they could offer better hardware within their budget: If you haven't already done this, buy an SSD for every workstation. Nowadays, you can get 128GB for $200 or less.
Do that, and make sure the system has 4GB+ RAM, and 2 monitors at high resolution, and your hardware will feel brand new to the guys on your team.
I did this a couple years ago as one of my first acts after being promoted, and it worked great. I paid a bit more to get the drives that came with an upgrade kit (that is, an enclosure and imaging software). Gave them to each dev to take care of themselves.
I didn't have to wait on and work with the bureaucratic IT department, and a dozen SSDs was cheap enough I could put it on my card without needing CFO approval.
You don't need "The Best" hardware. In fact, it reminds me of the saying that "People buy horsepower, but they drive torque."
What matters to developers isn't how many FLOPs you can do, but how quickly can you load your VMs and start Eclipse and grep your local filesystem.
- StavrosK 15y agoMy five-year-old Macbook with a new SSD is very noticeably faster than my brand new Macbook Pro with an HDD. I don't know why people still use HDDs. Don't answer, it was rhetorical.
- SkyMarshal 15y agoI'll answer anyway since it's an interesting question. Space is still cheaper on hdd's, and data volatility concerns. Is the latter still an issue with SSDs, or have they reached the point now where you can store your music collection on them and not worry about losing it in two or three years?
- rawsyntax 15y agoYou should always worry about losing it, traditional spinning disk or not. That said, my SSD is doing just fine, but I still have a full backup of it.
- gaius 15y agoWith Time Machine, there's no reason for anyone on OSX not to have backups, it's so incredibly easy to do, and you set it up once and forget about it until you need it.
- StavrosK 15y agoIt's probably just space, as volatility isn't a very good excuse. Sure, it's worse with SSDs, but you need to always have backups.
- sjs 15y agoIf your backup strategy doesn't account for your main disk failing at any given time you've already lost.
- Ronkdar 15y agoYes, SSDs have a read/write limit, but the average time it takes to hit it is longer than the mean time to failure of HDDs.
- delackner 15y agoMy original macbook has an SSD in the optical drive slot with all applications and the OS. In the HDD bay is a large hard drive containing all user data. Fun oddity after switching to SSD: If the laptop gets REALLY hot from long term summer usage, in the past I would just slap a cooling pad under it to get the fans to stay quiet. Now, the cooling pad somehow causes the SSD to freeze, so I have the cooling pad sitting only under the left half of the machine, and all is well.
- illamint 15y agoEchoing this. Most workloads don't need dual Xeons, or even more than 4GB of RAM, but an SSD and two big monitors can make even a low-end machine feel like an absolute Ferrari when you're not waiting for Outlook to launch or wasting time otherwise. SSDs are the best productivity upgrade you can buy: $100, maybe $200 per developer and suddenly no one's sitting around just waiting for their IDE to launch.
- jseliger 15y agoI'm not a developer, and I still think an SSD is the most significant marginal upgrade I've seen in the last 10 years. If you told me I could use a machine with Core Duo and an SSD or a modern Xeon and a standard HD, for almost all of what I do, I'd choose the former.