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by wildmusings
3272 days ago
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When I worked at Microsoft, you needed a large drive to have multiple copies of the Windows source code and prebuilt object files (which made building modified components much faster). Especially when you needed to work out of multiple branches, for example to fix a bug in a shipped version of Windows for a patch as well as in the current in-development version. SSDs made building much faster, but having only 256GB would have been limiting, depending on how many subdivisions and branches of the Windows source code you needed to work on. I also had another machine solely dedicated to running VMs. I had a scheduled script every morning that would create a VM from the daily build of my team's branch, setup various tools on it, and make snapshots along the way. I liked to keep old VMs around so I could do a manual bisect and find out what build introduced a bug. Having a 1TB hard drive was very nice because I could go longer without having to purge old VMs. |
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It's a lot better than it used to be, because the switch from Source Depot to Git means that you can use branches instead of having multiple copies of the repo if you want to work on multiple things at once (which to me was always the one huge PITA about Source Depot, which was otherwise pretty good as far as non-distributed VCS's go). Combined with the build caching, you could probably get away with building Windows on a 256 GB drive now, even if most devs have more.