- Posted by liammclennan on March 8, 2009
Stephen King wrote about his preference for listening to AC/DC and other loud rock when he is working. Many developers also like to listen to music as they work but are stuck with the disgraceful desktop speakers that came bundled with their PC. If there is one thing I can't stand, it's bad sound.
A few years ago I upgraded my desktop speakers to a pair of Behringer MS20s. While they are technically low-end studio monitors the MS20s make great desktop speakers. They include a built-in 20W RMS amplifier as well as both analog and digital inputs (coax and optical).
Initially they had a muddy bottom end that was caused by vibrations being transferred to my desk. The desk was functioning as a large, poorly designed bass woofer that ruined the sound. I cut an eraser into eight pieces, put one piece under each corner of each speaker, and the problem largely disappeared. If you care about your desktop sound then the MS20 are great value at around AU$160 for the pair. They also work well for voip applications. Here is how mine are setup:
- Posted by liammclennan on February 19, 2009
We have known for sometime that hard drive speed is the most common performance bottleneck for .NET developers working in visual studio. As
Scott Guthrie put it:
"If you have a slow hard-drive, Visual Studio will end up being blocked as it waits for it to complete these read/write operations - which can really slow down your overall development experience. "
and:
"Consider getting a 10,000rpm hard drive. These are lightening fast and can make a big difference over the default 7,200rpm drives that typically come with desktops"
So when researching my most recent development machine upgrade I gave serious consideration to a couple of Western Digital Velociraptors. By all reports these things leave convential drives chocking in a cloud of I/O burned rubber. But alas, the price! Expect to pay approximately 400% of the price of a conventional 7,200rpm drive.
Now that is a bit out of my price range (thanks global economic crisis) but what I did have lying around was three regular 250Gb SATA drives.
The machine in question has an Asus P5E motherboard, which includes the outstanding Intel ICH9R raid controller. In five minutes I was up and running with a three-disk RAID 0 array. If I had a fourth disk I would have been able to add some nice redundancy with a RAID 0+1 array. Windows installed faster. Visual Studio is faster. Everything is faster.
If anyone were to read my blog they might point out that I am taking a big risk with my data. If just one of the three disks fails I lose everything. I imagine that data recovery would be difficult since the data is striped across the three drives. To mitigate the risk I don't store any important data on my developement PC. My work is mostly scattered around various online SVN repositories and my media is on a seperate server. If a drive fails the only thing I will lose is a day repaving windows.
So overall I am happy with my new setup. If your motherboard supports RAID why not get out of the slow lane?