January 14, 2017 at 11:02 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Development Lab
January 16, 2017 at 6:25 am
I am the antithesis of who you are asking to post. As I find that I do little development on my own hardware at the moment, I haven't upgraded for a number of years after I scheduled my hardware for replacement. As soon as I need a machine I shall replace the current hardware immediately as then I shall be desparate. Clearly I am not a gadget addict (I guess I had to give it up as the rest of the household are).
Where I am buying at the moment is personal storage. I have been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for backup storage along with One Drive, however, I am currently moving to (or rather additionally using) Lima devices. This will enable authorised only sharing and access from anywhere online of backed up data. The backup is achieved via a second Lima device which synchronises with the first. It is all encrypted too.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
January 16, 2017 at 10:36 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor - Saturday, January 14, 2017 11:02 AMComments posted to this topic are about the item The Development Lab
I'm not a hardware geek either, but your editorial resonated with me. This weekend I found myself buying a new SSD for my home desktop to replace one I already have. I only use it for my OS, and the 120GB I have has been fine for 5 years now. I literally just needed to replace what I have.
But something about buying something new makes me want to buy the most and the best. For a few dangerous minutes, I found myself browsing & comparing the 1TB+ drives. In the end, I got a 250GB SSD (restrained, but still more than I needed).
Leonard
Madison, WI
January 16, 2017 at 10:56 am
Unless my off-hours learning and hobby programming turns into a full fledged side business, I don't plan plan to ever spend $,$$$ for a personal on-premises (ie: setup in my home) development lab. First, I've already got my work laptop, which I can (must actually) un-dock and the end of the day and take home with me. Also, thanks to Azure and AWS, we now have the option of spinning up a hosted VM with the full MS development stack preinstalled.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
January 16, 2017 at 12:17 pm
For me, my gaming machine & home test lab are one and the same, so putting some money into hardware isn't that crazy for me. In my case though, the latest and greatest isn't quite what I have. an i7 4790k makes for a pretty solid chip for either gaming or VM workloads, 32 GB of ram is a bit overkill for gaming but great for VMs, and I have 1 250GB SSD for my OS/ frequently played games, and one 250GB SSD for my frequently used VMS(sqlserver VM & Dev environment VM). I keep the Dev environment VM synced up between my desktop, NAs & Laptop, so I can have a consistent dev environment whether on the go or at home. My laptop is a think-pad W520 with the i7 2820QM processor and 12GB of RAM, which I picked up used for about $500.
I generally try to find a balance of performance & budget, and gradually upgrade things over time. Many of my parts are picked up used or refurbished, which results in my having decent equipment for a faction of the cost.
I also have a bunch of spinning rust storage for bulk file storage, and a 9TB NAS that I keep more stuff stored on, everything connected with gigabit Ethernet. I have yet to hit a home lab workload that my gaming/dev rig & laptop can't handle.
January 17, 2017 at 10:16 am
I am something of a hardware geek, although I'm not a developer.
What I do enjoy doing is puttering around with new software / hardware to see how it ticks, or how I can leverage it back at the office (I don't have a "sandbox" at work to use for various reasons.) Generally I re-purpose hardware to upgrade my lab, using hardware I retire from my desktop PC.
As I also game, my desktop is probably a fairly beefy box:
Intel I7 processor (don't recall the model offhand)
32GB RAM
256GB m.2 PCIe drive
4TB 7200k HD
2x ATI r270 GPUs
4k monitor
My lab consists of a couple home-built servers and one Dell PowerEdge I picked up on the cheap.
Dell PowerEdge r900 (running Hyper-V 2008R2)
4x Xeon quad-core CPUs
64GB RAM
120GB SSD
1TB HD
The home-built servers aren't much, one is an older Core2 Quad as my primary domain controller, the other is a Xeon and 16GB of RAM as a virtualization host for my other 2 domain controllers and my network controller.
Lastly I've got a box built as a NAS, ~8GB RAM, 4x 2TB HDs, 2x 2TB HDs as an iSCSI target for the virtual guests for things like SQL clustering and such.
Network-wise I've got a 24-port 1GBe switch (managed,) an Ubiquiti UniFi router, and a UniFi UAP-AC-Pro wifi access point.
All the server hardware is mounted in an APC 72U 4-post rack in the basement which came with an 8-port APC KVM.
The PowerEdge and the rack both came off Craigslist (and the rack was LOTS of fun to get home, even disassembled it stuck out the back of the trunk of the car) and neither cost me more than $200.
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