Just curious, I'd like to poll our users (that means you!) to see who's tried running a VM from a removable drive (USB hard drive, flash memory or "USB key", etc.)?
If you have tried this, how was the performance?
One performance note I found when trying this is that portable hard drives tend to be a bit slower than typical desktop hard drives, and flash memory drives (even the best ones) tend to be a lot slower. And Windows by default disables write caching on removable drives (good for safety if you like yanking cables without doing "safely remove hardware", but bad for performance). The upshot is our optimization for fast suspends ends up doing badly on slow uncached drives, and your VM may run slower than it should. One workaround for this is to set "mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE" in your .vmx file for any VMs you plan to use on portable/slow drives. Or, you can turn on write caching for that drive (but only if you know what this means, and then be very careful about telling Windows before unplugging the drive!).
