Running VMs off external USB HD. Regular HD or SSD ?

JesperMP

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I am using an external Lacie Ruggeddisk for running older softwares for support of legacy projects. The software are installed in VMware VMs on the external HD. The external disk is connected via USB3.
This is the solution I have, because our IT dept. do not allow me to place VMs on the local HD (which is an SSD).

This works OK, except for that starting up Windows and starting up the software and loading the project takes an unreasonably long time.
Especially if you just have to quickly check a small thing, the long startup time is annoying.
So I wonder if an external USB SSD would be significantly better.

Since these USB SSD disks are quite pricey, I dont want to jump unless I am certain that it will make a real difference.

Anyone has experience with this ?
 
Sad to hear about your IT Department.

Some of my colleages have recently switched over to using USB3 SSD devices and it makes a big difference compared to spinning rust. The ones used by my colleagues came from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ADATA-Wate...=UTF8&qid=1535544058&sr=8-19&keywords=usb+ssd

Personally, I don't approve of running VM's from an external disk due to past bad experiences of corrupting the VM if the connection is lost while the VM is open. I did battle with the IT people and purchased a 512GB SSD for my laptop. This allows me to store/run 1 VM from a local disk and use an external 2TB USB disk for backups of VM's.

Nick
 
Make the jump to an SSD now!

I've used this enclosure

With different SDDs over the years. You really can't beat the price of a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO

I had a similar IT issue back in ~2012. I dropped in a Crucial 512SSD in the spare hard drive bay and saved me so many headaches. (That was ~ $330 for 512GB at the time and still in use!)
 
Thanks for the feedback.

About the VMs getting corrupted, I dont have had any issues with that (fingers crossed).
About installing a second local SSD, I was thinking about it, but dont think our IT will allow that. I shall try to ask, but their will is usually unbendable.

Pending I dont get to install a second local SSD, I guess I will take the jump to a USB SSD !
 
The best performance I've gotten running my VMs on an external HDD was with a USB3 solid state drive.

I use a 250 GB Samsung T3; very small and light so it's easy to keep it secure to my PC. You can get 512 GB in the same form factor for under $200 now.

It's not as fast as the onboard drives, but it's far and away better than a spinning external HDD.

You'll find real differences in performance between vendors and models. Samsung T3 was at the time the best benchmarked device in its class.
 
Pending I dont get to install a second local SSD, I guess I will take the jump to a USB SSD !

My laptop was purchased with a 256GB SSD and had no space for a second disk so I had a ghost image made and then restored to a 512GB SSD so system and VM are now on one SSD and the result is much more user friendly.

Nick
 
I haven't had experience running VM's off any external disks, but a few weeks back I was helping a friend out by extracting around 80GB of music of an old iPod classic (still had the click wheel). It took around 8 hours to transfer over USB to my laptop. Then, I bought a Samsung USB3 SSD and copied all 80GB of music from my laptop to the SSD. It took four and a half minutes.
 
Thanks for the feedback.

About the VMs getting corrupted, I dont have had any issues with that (fingers crossed).
About installing a second local SSD, I was thinking about it, but dont think our IT will allow that. I shall try to ask, but their will is usually unbendable.

Pending I dont get to install a second local SSD, I guess I will take the jump to a USB SSD !

Do you have DVD driver on laptop?
There is adapters which convert DVD driver bay to HDD slot. Then you have your 2nd drive local and no IT dept needed
 
In one of my last jobs, I bought myself a new larger hard drive (luckily the laptop came with 320Gb).
Imaged the hard drive, placed the image in the new hard drive, then installed windows on the remaining space and used the laptop license to activate it (Company used corporate licenses for OS).

I then ran whatever I wanted on the dual boot system.

Eventually, IT got wind of it... so I took this away, got a CD drive dock and put the hard drive in and booted off of the BIOS and ran it this way.

Not ideal, and certainly not possible for all, but I got lucky.
 
Unfortunately (or fortunately ?) no DVD bay.

After thing about it, I have decided to not risk bringing the wrath of the IT kommisariat upon me, so I wont try to get a 2nd internal SSD. He who flies under the radar lives longer (there are some other things I dont want them to get wind of ... hush hush !).
I will definitely get a USB SSD.
 
I'm pretty sure the secret mantra for all IT departments is "impeding efficient and effective business operations using all means possible. ".

When the new Google Drive app came out that would let you sync team drives to your local laptop, i put in a request to get it installed. We were already using the older one. 2 weeks later... all Google Drive apps blocked due to security concerns.

I now have a corporate laptop which i only use for Leave Requests and accessing Company Forms.

The other "Automation Implementation System" stays at least 3 feet away from any corporate network, but does all it needs to do.
 
Jesper,
I use a lot of VM's because I work on so many systems. I have so many VM images, that there is no way to keep them all on internal hard drives. I often have to use an external drive. The spinning external drives take a very long time to start and stop, I think the stopping is more annoying. You're ready to leave for the day and you have to wait 15 minutes for your VM to shut down.
A coworker recently purchased an external SSD drive. It is at least 10 times faster loading VM's, maybe more. Make sure your laptop has a USB 3.0 connection ( they are blue, here in the US).
 

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