VM's on separate drive?

[randomlinh]

Has anyone noticed if running your VM on the OS X boot drive vs a secondary drive makes any significant difference?

 

[Kaido]

It really depends on what you're doing. If you're using OS X apps with heavy read/writes on the hard drive and also running a VM, that's going to slow down performance. It's still very usable on a fast drive, however. I keep mine on a second drive for convenience...more space on my boot drive and the VM gets it's own drive to play on

 

[randomlinh]

yeah, i figured w/ heavy stuff it'd help, but was curious on day to day. worst i'd be doing is ripping a dvd from the VM to space on the mac. I doubt i'll be doing any of that while photoshopping, heh. just trying to figure out how to divide up my HDD's righ tnow, ha

 

[Viper0329]

I noticed it depends heavily on the drive. My MBP came with a 5400rpm 160gb drive, and I noticed a very significant increase in speed when I moved my vm from my internal drive to an external eSATA 500gb 7200rpm drive. But once I upgraded my internal drive to a 320gb 7200rpm drive, the difference was negligible for day to day tasks. When doing lots of read/writes on either, it makes a very large difference having them separate.

 

[Tyranicus]

Why are you ripping DVDs with your VM?

 

[randomlinh]

DVDFab HD is better than Mactheripper =)

 

[mshan]

I installed VMWare Fusion / XP on an external drive and one obvious annoyance is that you have to exit / suspend Fusion to allow iMac sleep to function properly (it wakes up right after going to sleep). External hard drive was a usb connected Venus T4U with a WD3200 IDE hard drive in it.

Don't know if I had something configured improperly, but it is a rather significant nuissance.

 

[randomlinh]

oh man, VM's on an external USB? I cried when I tried an external FW400.. I can't imagine doing it on USB. But that behavior is pretty much expected.. you have a container that has to manage a system, it's always running

 

[mshan]

Will same thing happen if I put it on the internal system drive of the iMac?

 

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: mshan
Will same thing happen if I put it on the internal system drive of the iMac?

my guess is yes. I'm not sure if Fusion is smart enough to know if your VM goes to sleep, then it can too. Otherwise, I would assume Fusion is always active unless you have the machine paused/suspended from within Fusion.