Booting Windows 7 and VS 2010 on SSD in 18 seconds

I've been doing quite a bit of work with VS2010 recently as we've prepared for our launch of our free ASP.NET 4 hosting, and I had a fresh install of Windows 7 without the typical cruft that comes with our environment. So I wanted to show how quick booting off of a SSD is. There are two pieces of hardware EVERY developer must have - multiple monitors and a SSD. I've said it over and over again, I have never seen a single upgrade improve the performance of a PC more than my X-25M drive since I first saw what the Voodoo2 could do.

I took this video to show how quick the sucker is because until you have used it, you probably think I'm full of crap. But this sucker FLIES. My previous OS partition was running on a couple of 10,000 RPM drives running RAID 0, and there is simply no comparison. I skipped the BIOS and went right to the boot loader. It boots Windows 7, and then I dumped VS2010 Ultimate and Firefox 3.6 in my start up folder. I'm ready to rock and roll in 18 seconds.

Oh, and one more thing - this is a VHD hard drive that I'm booting off of so it's actually slightly slower than my typical install. I just didn't want to mess around with that on video due to all the logins and junk I gotta do by hand when logging onto our network.

I know a bunch of people are waiting for the prices to go down, but don't! You may get it $100 cheaper a year from now, but this thing is well worth the extra $2 a week to have it right now.

9 Comments

  • So how big is your SSD, and what part of that is your VHD for this development image? If you have multiple VHDs, are they all on the same SSD, or do you swap them back and forth from a second drive? Do you have a SATA data drive that you share among virtual machines?

  • Hey Josh, I'm just using an 80GB drive for my boot partition. My Win7 VHD is 20GB which is big enough for what Im doing.

    I do have a few VHds that I leave on my 500gb secondary that I'll copy over, but I rarely use them. I also use this as a drive that I share amongst them.

  • Wow, impressive! Would you mind posting the specs on your machine? I will be upgrading my setup soon, and I would love to get something like this.

  • You convinced me. It's time to switch to SSD for my system drive. I can't stand to hear how these solid drivers make noises to read the data.

  • I use VHD with Windows 7 for development work. How did you combine SSD with VHD? I was under the imperession that VHD works only over hard drive. So it is possible to have VHD over SSD? Can you please share with us how did you configure your PC?

  • Wow, impressive! Would you mind posting the specs on your machine

  • I'm just using an 80GB drive for my boot partition.

  • Hi Phil,
    This sounds great. What are your experiences after same years? I read about issung TRIM Support when using VHD and SSD and this leads to a lost of lifetime.

  • I can't stand to hear how these solid drivers make noises to read the data.

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