[kwlug-disc] SSD Drives/desktop

[Darcy Casselman]

I wish I had eSATA on my laptop.  That way I could put a disk image
file on a spinning disk and see how that compares to the XP VM I've
got running on the SSD on the same machine.

Said VM *feels* faster than the enterprise workstation class machine
natively running Windows at work.

This is Windows we're talking about, after all.  It *always* swaps.
You could give it 32GB RAM and it'll still swap to disk.

Darcy.

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Lori Paniak
<ldpaniak at fourpisolutions.com> wrote:
> It is unlikely an SSD will increase the performance of your virtual
> machine.  If the VM is starved for memory and is swapping, then
> performance will be abysmal whether you have an SSD or not as the
> virtual disk driver will be the bottleneck.
>
> There are a couple easy (inexpensive) things to check to increase VM
> performance:
>
> 1) Is the VM running with a SATA/SCSI virtual disk?  These virtual
> devices are much faster than legacy IDE devices.
>
> 2) How much RAM is assigned to the VM?  For any version of Windows, this
> should be greater than 1GB.  More for Win 7.  Don't be afraid to give
> the VM more RAM.
>
> 3) Is hardware virtualization enabled in the host BIOS?  It should be if
> your CPU supports it.
>
> The best way to speed up a VM is to host it on a machine with plenty of
> RAM and a 64-bit CPU than supports hardware virtualization.  A 64-bit
> host OS helps too so that VMs can access as much memory as they need.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 19:16 -0400, Insurance Squared Inc. wrote:
>> My wife complains that when we run windows inside virtualbox that it's
>> slow.  I upgraded her ram to not much effect.
>>
>> Does anyone have comments on upgrading to an SSD drive under linux?
>> Looks like 64gigs are now down around $150.  Lots of chatter about boot
>> up times, but I don't care about that.  Do they make that much
>> difference in speed for general work?
>>
>> I've also read something about 'trim' which apparently linux doesn't
>> have - should one care?
>>
>>
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