[kwlug-disc] SSD Drives/desktop

Lori Paniak ldpaniak at fourpisolutions.com
Thu Oct 21 19:41:22 EDT 2010


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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