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I'm using VMware on my Lenovo R500 laptop for running developer enviroment (Win2003 server r2, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005). Everything runs fine except HDD, which is like 10x slower than on host os. Not really 10x, but a lot.
So, those are some ideas for speeding things up:
- i have one spare 3,5" hdd, 7200 rpm. If I buy external USB2 case, put/copy/move whole VM onto it, and boot up VM from it, should it be faster than running VM from internal 2.5" 5200rpm hdd?
- somehow map one partition from external 2.5" (USB2) drive to VM, and put swap file there. But in vmware, i cannot use external usb hdd as a new physical disk, i can put there just "regular" scsi hdd file.
- buy SSD (crucial m225, if i recall, is cheap/fast). But thats not the option right now :(
- all that solutions with external USB2 drives concerns me because of USB2 speed, which is significant lower than native speed of 3.5" hdd - 50MB/s (480 mbit usb2) vs 80MB (avarage read speed of seagate 7200.10 hdd). Will USB2 slow it down?
Edited:
- eSata ExpressCard, connected to external hdd. Can I use this external hdd like physical disk in vmware?
Please, give me some recommendations and guidelines.
Also, i gave 2gb of RAM to VM, and only 1gb is used when i look at Task Manager. So i guess it's enough.
Just wanted to update this; I upgraded my laptop and swapped the hard drive with a 256GB SSD. It's like my laptop sped up by 300%. My virtual Windows 7 instance boots in less than 10 seconds. Waking up from sleep, everything is instant. SSD is the only way to improve system speed. – osij2is – 2012-03-23T01:33:23.847