Was running a Dell XPS1730 T9300 2.2ghz with 4gb RAM laptop with 2x 250gb HDD in stripe and the performance was poor (about 30 seconds to compile my solution) I purchase 2x Dell Precision T7400 workstations from Ebay for AUD$1800 combined them and now I have a 2x Quad Core 2.5ghz Xeon with 8gb FB DDR RAM, with a Corsair 80gb Force SSD, plus 4x 200gb HDD's in stripe with a 2tb drive for backups. Now I compile in about 6 seconds. Next in my wish list is to get a PCI-e SSD (Revodrive most likely), as the max speed I get out of this SSD is about 170mb-200mb, PCI-e SSDs can get upwards to 500mb/s. I find that VS when compiling uses a massive amount of IO, it can help a little with programming speeds, and also helps alot with debugging speeds. But yeah it all comes down to budget. As also mentioned SSD's have a fixed life span, so they do "expire" after a certain amount of use, however you should get at least 24 months out of one, but not like Spindle drives which can last for several years.