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Asked: 2026-05-12T23:49:41+00:00

So my laptop hard drive reported a bad cluster last week, which is never

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So my laptop hard drive reported a bad cluster last week, which is never a good sign.

I’m going to be shopping for a hard disk, and I may as well plump for the upgrade to Windows 7, which means a reinstallation of Visual Studio and everything else.

This particular laptop has space for two hard disks, so I was thinking about an SSD drive in one and a larger fastish (7.2k) drive in the other.

Where should Visual Studio best go in this arrangement? And what about “special” folders like %TEMP%? Does it make sense to use a ReadyBoost USB stick when your pagefile is already on an SSD? Should the database server and files live on the hard drive? Should I get concerned about the SSD wearing out?

Thanks all…

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  1. Editorial Team

    Make sure you have 2GB+ of RAM. The more the better, as Win7 will use any spare RAM as a disk cache which will probably negate most of the advantage of an SSD. (We have a solution that took 6 minutes to load the first time in VS2005, and 20 seconds thereafter, due to the disk cache).

    If you have enough RAM, stick your temp & intermediate folders in a RAMdisk.

    Then split your remaining files over the two drives (e.g. apps and pagefile on one, source/object files on the other) to spread the I/O load across both drives. If using SSD, try to use it as a read-only device as much as possible.

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