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Just a few more thoughts:
If you are starting afresh, consider installing two drives in your machine: A SSD drive for the operating system and apps, and the second drive for data, including your Visual Studio projects. The second drive can be either a SSD, or a less expensive traditional HDD.
This will make it easy for you to back up your systems drive with an imaging utility, like Macrium's Reflect or AOEMI Backupper. Both of these have free versions.
Your data can be backed up by simple copying to an external drive. Your images should also be backed up to the external drive.
Leave the external drive(s) normally disconnected, in case you become the victim of malware that corrupts your internal drives.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
modified 13-Jan-18 17:25pm.
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For VS2017 I have pretty much everything installed except Android/iOS utilities and UWP. I don't remember exactly the size but it wasn't that bad (definitely wasn't over 40GB). Plus as others have mentioned you can dynamically add and remove components from your install which is extremely convenient.
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While others have pointed out the benefits of using Visual Studio with one or more SSDs, my opinion is that VS and SSD should play little to no factor in your decision to return to software development. Depending on how long you have been away from software development, you may find the languages, development frameworks/libraries and architecture have undergone considerable changes. This may present a large and formidable learning curve for you, especially if you must continue working full time at construction while studying on the side. I do not know what your circumstances are but my two cents worth of advice is that a return to software development will necessarily entail consideration of more important issues than VS and SSD.
History is the joke the living play on the dead.
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I wrote my own (very simple) IDE for working on C and C#.
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They call me Bruce wrote: I actually quit programming because of that
I sure hope that's a joke.
I don't have SSDs and do just fine at work. None of our developers have SSDs.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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I've too gone all SSD, my initial worries were more about the lifetime of SSD's under heavy use, well basically even for heavy home users that was just fake news. The consumer grade samsung evo's will handle years of work.
But something else I can report regarding SSD's: a client had some software running on XP they wanted moved to somebody else's machine - 2 years back they moved to new win 7 boxes. So it was off to their hardware graveyard to find a working XP machine, every single HDD failed, every single one, just because they had sat idle for 2 years. Found 1 machine with an old Intel 60GB SSD, (had vista on it). Moved that SSD to a smaller machine, installed xp (luckily it was a dell, say what you like about dell but they still have all of their old drivers on-line, and that handy sticker with the windows licence number on every machine.) I tried VM's but something in this app didn't like VM's - xp mode, virtualbox and wmware - all problematic, running direct on win 7 also rain weirdly.
Summary: Out of a stack of 11 used HDD's and 3 used SSD that had sat idle for 2 years: only SSD's still worked - all of them! Not one spinner worked - not a single one! (The smaller cap HDD's sort-of worked for a bit but would soon fail with bad blocks, the 250G and up spinners were all 100% lifeless and wouldn't even report presense to the bios.
Seems to me SSD's are in fact more durable than spinners, and for that little bit more a way smarter investment for your next upgrade. (Yes the speed diff is hugely noticable.)
On that even my earlier idea of using spinners as a backup is out the window, (and new external SSD's are all USB 3.1 ready which given their speed makes proper sense.) Not only are they smaller but I feel way more confident both chucking them into a backpack for commuting as well as putting them on a shelf for 6 months as long generation backups.
Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.
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To my dismay when I installed VS2017 Community Edition some weeks ago, the bulk was installed on the C: drive, despite telling the installer to install on D:.
I have a notebook with a 128 Gb SSD and a 1 Tb hard drive, the SSD is now half full already !
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Lopatir wrote: So it was off to their hardware graveyard to find a working XP machine, every single HDD failed, every single one, just because they had sat idle for 2 years
I kind of doubt that was the only reason. Nothing really in modern hard drives that would cause them to fail after a couple of years.
It isn't like letting a car sit in the garage for two years. Unless of course it is exactly like that. For instance the computers were left sitting in a garage-like room (little or no environmental controls and piled up on shelves.) That would probably have some impact. Or if they have been bounced around, physically, over time.
Or perhaps the computers were not all that great to begin with. And the hard drives were not good either.
For that matter were the connections resitted? Maybe constant haphazard moving around just jiggled. So fairly decent computers but the connectors were not great and they jiggled loose.
Lopatir wrote: as well as putting them on a shelf for 6 months as long generation backups.
6 months isn't that long. Keep in mind if you go longer that technology does change. So even if the hardware works in 20 years (if you want longer) you might not be able to spin up a system to read it.
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Yeah, the graveyard was in a warehouse, but the equipment had not been abused, just stuck on a high rack 2 years back and not touched since. No air-con, I'm told it's 25 - 30 degrees year round.
I've experienced similar before, brand new equipment can handle being stored for quite long, whereas used equipment (used daily) that is a few years old doesn't store very well.
And it still makes my point, used SSDs seems to outlast used HDDs.
jschell wrote:
6 months isn't that long. Keep in mind if you go longer that technology does change. So even if the hardware works in 20 years (if you want longer) you might not be able to spin up a system to read it.
As mentioned the new portable SSD's are USB 3.1 (Type-C) connector - I can't imagine these being unusable that soon. You do know motherboards still have serial and parallel ports and many even floppy drive connections, even though they don't expose them in today's cases the header cables and mounts are still available. (not to mention USB to serial/parallel/floppy/banana dongles are out there.) They still sell ps2 keyboards/mice. Many companies use dot matrix/thermal printers daily (and supplies available), I've seen dumb terminals for sale and still in use. There's companies that will help you recover magnetic tapes, heck I've seen farmers in Holland that still wear wooden clogs for certain tasks.
Technology will always be superseded/improved, yes my 500G portable SSD's will probably look small and probably be considered slow in a few of years, but will still be usable.
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lopati: roaming wrote: As mentioned the new portable SSD's are USB 3.1 (Type-C) connector - I can't imagine these being unusable that soon. You do know motherboards still have serial and parallel ports and many even floppy drive connections, even though they don't expose them in today's cases the header cables and mounts are still available. (not to mention USB to serial/parallel/floppy/banana dongles are out there.) They still sell ps2 keyboards/mice. Many companies use dot matrix/thermal printers daily (and supplies available), I've seen dumb terminals for sale and still in use. There's companies that will help you recover magnetic tapes, heck I've seen farmers in Holland that still wear wooden clogs for certain tasks.
All true, but that is stretching "usable" a bit.
I have some games that have 5.25" floppies but that doesn't mean that they are going to work if I just dig out a 5.25" drive. Both due to the material and to the way I am accessing them.
And consider what happens in a office, where one must find the 2002 (16 years later) accounting records. Presumably one is doing that because there is a certain amount of urgency in finding them, so rooting around to find the hardware and software needed to actually get to those can be problematic due to the time needed. That doesn't mean it can't be done but rather that one should take care in assuming how suitable it is.
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I've had the same experience though. I have a ton of used hard drives from various machines that we scrapped and while they hard drives were working when they were taken out, about 1 out of 10 were still working when I tried to re-image them for reuse. Most of them were Seagates. Some of them were remanufactured. At the time I chalked it up to old harddrive firmware not being compatible with new systems.
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In Visual Studio are settings to change the path of temp files and the code database. Search in the project settings. 
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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I have SSD and wouldn't go back, but there's always an option for a hybrid SSD drive. You can have capacity of standard HDD with speed near SSD (a bit slower though) and favorable prize (a bit higher than HDD, but nowhere near SSD). I'm thinking about hybrid 2TB to store the actual installations and DBs, while I will move projects and caches to SSD.
In order to understand stack overflow, you must first understand stack overflow.
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They call me Bruce wrote: now wear steel-cap boots and a hi-viz vest
G'day Bruce. So you are in a Village People revival band now?
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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They call me Bruce wrote: Is there any hope?
My VS2015 footprint is 1.5GB and my SSD is 500GB, , so I would say yes, there is hope. 
/ravi
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They call me Bruce wrote: Is there any hope?
Abandon all hope.
Basically, hope implies expectations. If you have no expectations, you're hopes won't be dashed against the hard barren rocks of reality.
If you do consider an alternative IDE that runs in Windows, I highly recommend Rider: Cross-platform .NET IDE by JetBrains
Latest Article - Code Review - What You Can Learn From a Single Line of Code
Learning to code with python is like learning to swim with those little arm floaties. It gives you undeserved confidence and will eventually drown you. - DangerBunny
Artificial intelligence is the only remedy for natural stupidity. - CDP1802
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You quit programming because of SSD's and MS bloated software?  You obviously didn't love coding enough. No, there is no hope.
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If you can't develop without Visual Studio, there is not much hope for you no. Stick to welding or whatever 
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Why would you have anything else BUT an giganormous SSD for each OS and build?
(really, it make much of a difference)
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Yes, there is hope. Use SymLinks !
I had the same problem, an HP notebook with a 128GB SSD and a 2TB HDD.
In C: there is the O.S., Windows 10, I tried to move it to D: partition, but it is too difficult, even the HP support discourages to do this, with this HP notebook you can't choose where to install the O.S.
But 128 GB is way too little if you need to install softwares on C:
To save space on the precious C: partition I try to install all softwares on D: partition
The C: partition had 79 GB before installing Visual Studio 2017 C.E.
I asked VS2017 to install on D: partition, but it used only 5GB on D:, 40 GB on C:.
So, after VS2017 install, only 29 GB were left on C:.
After 1 hour only 19 GB left (I guess some automatic updates occurred).
I really don't understand why Microsoft can't manage to install VS out of C:
Anyway, this solution worked for me:
use symlinks to move some folders from C: to D: or another partition.
I did this:
create a new folder D:\_moved_from_C_ProgramFilesX86
move "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs" to "D:\_moved_from_C_ProgramFilesX86\Microsoft SDKs"
run this command from a command prompt, running as administrator:
mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs" "D:\_moved_from_C_ProgramFilesX86\Microsoft SDKs"
repeat the same with "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits"
This saved 11 GB on my C: partition.
I checked if performances on build were affected: yes, but just a little, about 4 %.
I used symlinks also with other folders that need to appear as C: folders
If symlinks didn't exist I had to give away this notebook.
Bye
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I'm on my second system with and SSD. Both have had 500GB SSDs. Space is no longer an issue as I've had Visual and Android Studios on one of them.
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Basically the whole Windows/Microsoft/.Net ecosystem is dead. You should just install Linux, GCC and focus on building software to run on a POSIXLY correct system.
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I don't understand this. You were programming, and making GOOD Money???
And buying an SSD was the stopping you from enjoying programming?
So you took a physical job instead...
Strange. In my early years I always spent more money on my PC than on my CARS.
Those days are gone (because cars are crazy expensive)...
But my PC has 2 SSDs (2TB, and a 1TB), and 32GB of memory. But I had 1 SSD and one regular when they frist came out. I quickly calculated the time savings of the SSD and it pays for itself really quickly.
For $5,000 you could have a pretty amazing machine. Easily good for 3 years.
That's like $150/month for your #1 expense at this job...
I will assume that is less than 1 days take home per month.
I spent the last month TURNING OFF things with monthly expenses (home phone, etc) that save me that much a month, and it feels great.
But You could not pay me $1,000/month to go back to regular HDs. So much so that I have a NAS box and scheduled backups now because I am paranoid (we have had 2 SSDs go bad) about data loss with SSDs.
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You misunderstand. A full install of the latest VS is way over 50GB which MUST go on your primary drive. You can choose the install path all you want, but 99% of it goes on the SSD, which cannot cope. All the rest of the crap goes to the secondary or tertiary drives, but there is an immense amount of shite which MUST go on your primary drive.
If your primary drive is an SSD, you are S.O.L.
I DO have an amazing machine - It, however cannot cope with a glaring f***up by MS
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They call me Bruce wrote: If your primary drive is an SSD, you are S.O.L.
My PC at work has VS2003 (don't ask), VS2008 (don't ask2), VS2015, and VS2017, all full installs, on a 1TB SSD.
My machine at home has basically the same setup.
How is this an S.O.L. situation?
Software Zen: delete this;
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