Which SCM is less disk intensive? (GIT vs SVN vs others)

I wonder which of the pouplar SCM's (especially I am interested in GIT, SVN) is less disk intensive.

The thing is that, I was going to get an SSDisk (SSD) ) and they have limited write cycles. And I was thinking about that SCM's maintain many files and therefore intensive usage of them could lead to shorter lifespan of the disk (:

To my mind GIT is more disk intensive since it maintains full history and jumping from version to version is much easier.

Your thoughts? :D

bakytn

Posted 2011-05-15T06:30:47.297

Reputation: 1 537

6Honestly, it's not going to make any noticeable difference to your SSD's lifespan. Choose any DVCS (I prefer Git) because of the productivity gains over centralized version control. – Stephen Jennings – 2011-05-15T07:27:52.207

Answers

While Git is working with a full history, it will mainly do read access to compute the differences with said history.

If you are that concerned with write access on a SDD:

initialize your DVCS repo on a USB stick
save on logoff your current development by making a bundle on your local SSD (only one file is created/updated) in a Dropbox directory.

That way, you would really keep those write operations to a minimum ;)

VonC

Posted 2011-05-15T06:30:47.297

Reputation: 13 292

Interesting approach :D Thanks! ))) (to be honest, I was going to use external USB Flash drive) – bakytn – 2011-05-17T05:07:29.363

As git compresses files on demand (older versions of files not used in head) and stores same hash/content only once, there won't be much waste of space or write/erase cycles in comparison to other systems like svn.

Wear leveling handles block erases quite well, just make sure you have enough space free as spare on your drive.

mbx

Posted 2011-05-15T06:30:47.297

Reputation: 724