I can say my build times went down considerably. However I moved to a completely new machine. I didn't plan on writing an article so I don't have any official

I can say my build times went down considerably. However I moved to a completely new machine. I didn't plan on writing an article so I don't have any official bench marks. I'm guessing they dropped from over a minute and a half for a full recompile to under 30 seconds. Incremental builds used to take about 20 seconds and now take between 2 and ten seconds. I went from a athlon X64 at 2.2Ghz and 2GB Ram with a 74GB raptor and another 74GB raptor for code to a Core i7 Extreme at 4Ghz and 12GB Ram with 2x80GB intel SSDs in raid 0 and 1 80GB intel SSD for code. A couple of important things to keep in mind. Intel is still the way to go. The other SSDs can actually be slower in write performance than a normal hard drive if the usage pattern is small files. That is pretty much what you get when you compile. One other point is that crappy anti-virus software can affect IO performance anywhere from 12X trend micro, 24X Norton. Yes that is Norton will reduce your IO by 2400% in my tests. AVG Free is 19%. So he could have negated the performance gain from the SSD by running bad anti-virus software. I can say my productivity feels like it nearly tripled. The important measurement from a programming perspective is not necessarily just the second or two here or there. My work flow changed. I used to hit build and walk out and get drink from the fridge in the garage and it would still be compiling. Now I can't even do anything but glance at my email. These interruptions sometimes take you out of the zone and it can take a long time to get back in the zone. Getting up could easily cost me fifteen minutes or even a half an hour. Just because I lost my train of thought. Update: I'm running windows 7 and visual studio 8 on this machine.