Speed up VMs hdd perfomance

Speed up VMs hdd perfomance I'm using VMware on my Lenovo R500 laptop for running developer enviroment (Win2003 server r2, Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005). Everything runs fine except HDD, which is like 10x slower than on host os. Not really 10x, but a lot.
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Total answers/comments: 2

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Guest [Entry]

"If you have the money, SSD will be the only noticeable difference. If you can add more RAM as well that will help, but SSDs will be the key to really speeding things up especially for VMWare or general virtualization.

I currently run VMWare Fusion running Windows 2k8 with VS2008, SQL2008, BizTalk 2009, etc. etc. on my MacBook Pro w/ 4GB of RAM and the disk is the only thing slowing everything down. It doesn't matter how fast a CPU you use as long as the data is on the slowest device, everything (RAM, Bus, CPU) has to wait for it to get the data.

An external USB connected drive will do nothing noticeable for you. Remember, that disk still has to spin up and get the data then send it via USB to the PCI bus on the motherboard. You've simply moved the problem from inside your laptop to the outside of your laptop.

The difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm is barely noticeable at all. In all seriousness, if you want to see any difference in speeds, save some cash and get SSD. All other options are really just teasing you in the hopes things will be better, but I can guarantee you it won't be worth the time, money and effort in comparison to SSD."

Guest [Entry]

The first thing to do to improve disk IO for the VM - if you haven't done it already - is run the defrag disk option from within VMware.