Lightning Fast Development Machine for home

[NotAllThere]

Waste of money and increase in complexity and risk. SSDs are already implemented internally as multiple RAID-0 banks of RAM.

And doubling the width of the array has no effect?

As I'm sure you're already aware, a single disk failure in a RAID-0 array takes out the whole array.

Yes - that's why I emphasised a good backup solution. A single disk failure in a single SSD takes out the "whole array".

If you really want faster I/O than a single SATA SSD can provide (and it's unlikely you'll see a performance increase outside of a synthetic benchmark if you do), go PCIe SSD

I was running a VM on a spare SSD I had laying around - but the capacity wasn't really enough, so I added in another SSD and made it a single RAID0 volume. The VM ran noticeably quicker.

...The issue with laptops is that by the time you've plugged in the power supply, two cables for external monitors, external keyboard, a speaker cable, etc, etc, it's resembles something on a life support machine. Kind of loses its 'portability'...

Never heard of a "docking station"?

A PC for the proper developer.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/nav/pea.../customize.php

2TB RAM and 4 x 24 core Xeon.

Great, I've got drool on my keyboard now.

[NorthWestPerm2Contr]

+1 Customer service is faultless too. Bonus for us, we can drive to the shop in about 40 mins too, always useful that.

Overclockers do seem like a good option given what everybody is saying about them and their online reviews...... Despite having an awful website. May well go with them and get the spec I want.

[b0redom]

And doubling the width of the array has no effect?

Depends if you're saturating the SATA interface. I wouldn't say no effect, but it's not double, not even anywhere approaching it, and you are doubling the chance of losing your entire array.

[NigelJK]

So do you run VS in a VM - which spec did you go for. 8 core machine sets you back £200 a month.

Spec'd a pretty basic 4 core VM with VS2015 on it and it was quicker than my core i7 8 core dev machine for local builds (taking 2-3 minutes on my dev machine and less than 30 secs on the VM) at the time it was £3.95 month so a no brainer. They went for this as the basic dev machines for their team as the IT dept were getting very 'political' (not giving me access to the UAT server for instance) so I was asked to come up with another solution as it would take months to get 4 machines sorted. I went on to do more for this reason and they ended up with a whole dev cycle (including CI) in VM's with no involvement from the IT dept.

[Lockhouse]

Take a look at Overclockers UK, you can build your own with them.

I've bought 2 PCs from there, excellent value for money.

Bit late to the party but another recommendation for OverClockers. Reliable and quick with good build quality. Have recommended them to others who have also been pleased.

[MrMarkyMark]

Bit late to the party but another recommendation for OverClockers. Reliable and quick with good build quality. Have recommended them to others who have also been pleased.

Did they, also, find the web site too difficult to use?

[Willapp]

If you're a dev and want performance, first thing is don't get a laptop. Even the i7s are usually low power versions which don't even come close to the performance of a desktop i7.

I use Visual Studio a lot at home and it runs great on my self-build which is now two years old:

Intel i7-4960K
16Gb RAM
Geforce GTX970 GPU
512Gb Intel SSD Pro

Cost less than £1k including case, keyboard and mouse but not monitors or windows license (already had both).

Main performance bottlenecks are going to be CPU and SSD speed for build time/general IDE performance. Also be wary if you run AV software that does real-time file scanning, it can go crazy when you do builds due to the amount of file access. My client laptop is crippled by 3 different AV packages and they've had to exclude our source code folder from real-time scanning because it killed our build performance.

[OwlHoot]

To be fair I'd clas myself as an expert developer but I don't know much at all about the state of current hardware. I stopped being a nerd on the subject when my PC Format sub ended at 17 and stopped caring at all about 2010... I pretty much dislike computers especially having to build/configure/administer them. ...

Flip me, I never knew I had an identical twin brother - and dooohg of all people!

[billybiro]

£1500 which I thought is way too much for a dev machine

Call yourself a contractor? Hell, call yourself a developer even? £1500 is nothing for a decent development rig. Stop being a tight wad and get your cheque book out!

Bit put off by it's name

And I'll bet you're the kind of person who decides on his next car purchase based on the paint colour, aren't you?

[woohoo]

Spec'd a pretty basic 4 core VM with VS2015 on it and it was quicker than my core i7 8 core dev machine for local builds (taking 2-3 minutes on my dev machine and less than 30 secs on the VM) at the time it was £3.95 month so a no brainer. They went for this as the basic dev machines for their team as the IT dept were getting very 'political' (not giving me access to the UAT server for instance) so I was asked to come up with another solution as it would take months to get 4 machines sorted. I went on to do more for this reason and they ended up with a whole dev cycle (including CI) in VM's with no involvement from the IT dept.

Really interesting. I use Azure but moved my stuff from a VM to app services. But I do have a 70 quid allowance so will have a play around with a VM with VS on it. I don't think its going to replace my super pc but it's an option when I'm onsite and don't necessarily want to carry my laptop around.