Are there any known issues with Windows-8 installed on a VHD?

I installed Windows 8 preview on a VHD image and it seemed to work until I actually started using it. I´m seeing terrible performance. Installing anything makes everything else "stutter" or freeze for up to a couple of seconds at a time.

I looked up hard disk performance in the task manager and this is what I found:

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It doesn't seem right it has 2500ms response time while reading/writing at those speeds. Is this an issue with my drive, installation or VHDs in general?

richardwiden

Posted 2011-12-04T13:28:34.000

Reputation: 534

1Attention: There is only a limited amount of memory given to drivers, called the non-paged and paged pool memory sections. A page file is necessary for when the paged section gets full, as a gamer I have seen a game complain about paged pool memory just because I had my page file disabled on a 8 GB system. Conclusion: Page files are necessary, they prevent paged pool depletion and actually do speed up your system. – Tamara Wijsman – 2011-12-04T13:54:59.530

Related: Server Fault - Any benefit or detriment from removing a pagefile on an 8GB RAM machine? – Tamara Wijsman – 2011-12-04T13:56:20.143

Plus, task manager is not an ideal tool. It's like judging an athlete's performance based on a single frame of video. "My God! BOTH his feet are in the air when he's running. He must be fast!!" – surfasb – 2011-12-04T15:18:48.233

I've tried installing Windows 8 Enterprise on both VMWare and Virtualbox and it's useable depending on your system's specs. The greatest bottleneck for VMs seem to be the virtual harddrive, so use RAID0/1 or an SSD if you want really fast VMs – Earlz – 2012-09-17T14:34:56.610

Answers

I've been running Windows 8 from a VHD from the first day and had no problems.

The only thing the VHD install seems incapable of is that you can't utilize Hybrid Boot...

As for your problem, I don't experience it. Please note though that I'm using a SSD...

Some suggestions:

Be sure to install all your drivers on Windows 8 DP! Use compatibility mode where necessary...
It seems like you have a lot of disks connected to your system, please note that a broken cable / controller or hard disk can cause other I/O to be at 100%. Try disconnecting everything that's not necessary to boot your system and then try again to see whether it improves the behavior...

Or, you might want to reboot in your previous OS and compare it with Windows 8 Developer Preview.

Tamara Wijsman

Posted 2011-12-04T13:28:34.000

Reputation: 54 163

You are still getting response times at 500ms. To me it just seems as if you have the same issues but the SSD just makes them less visible. – richardwiden – 2011-12-04T13:46:33.387

@Richard: Isn't that expected behavior when running a benchmark? The disk queue is filled so the response time for a single queue entry is delayed. If I just browse the disk and do some normal stuff it stays within the 0 - 100 ms range. The thing to note is that I don't experience any sluggish performance. In your case the speeds suffer under it which I don't see when doing this benchmark. The active time is also different, being around 90% is way different than being at a constant 100%... – Tamara Wijsman – 2011-12-04T13:48:10.310