Tuesday March 18, 2008 Speeding up VMware on my laptop
I've been fighting battles with VMware on my laptop for some time now. Even though I have 2 gigs of RAM, enough to easily fit two VMs fully in memory and still have enough left over for XP, I have been subject to very frequent periods where my disk light would come on, the drive would start audibly thrashing, and my whole computer would freeze for 30 or more seconds.
The solution, it turns out, was an eSATA external hard drive. I picked up a 200 GB 7200 RPM 2.5 inch drive, plopped it into an external eSATA /USB case, got an eSata express card, and copied my VMs over.
They now launch faster, run faster, and I have yet to experience the 30 second total system lockouts that had been the norm for as long as I can remember.
The only downside is the ugly, non-flexible eSATA cable. Man those things suck. The person who figures out how to make a thin-flexible eSATA cable will have my $$.
UPDATE: Be sure to disable Windows write caching...almost lost a critical VM when a cable came loose (had to revert to a backup I had luckily made earlier in the day). You do this my opening My Computer, right clicking on the drive and selecting "Properties", go to the Hardware tab, select your drive again, then click the Properties button at the bottom, select the Policies tab, then FINALLY click the "Optimize for quick removal" radio button.
Posted by rickg ( Mar 18 2008, 07:06:18 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]