Disk performance with BootCamp

[neongrau]

I'm running Windows XP (SP3) on my BootCamp partition with my MBP 2.4ghz (4gig RAM) on OS X 10.5.5 with Fusion Version 2.0 (116369)

I've noticed that file access seems awfully slow when i'm checking out or commiting from/to a SVN repository within windows.

Throughput when copying large file seems ok, just working with loads of small files is sluggish.

My boss is running almost the same setup (just 2.5ghz) and also started complaining about the slow speed thinking about migrating his BootCamp installation to a normal VM container.

Is there anything i could do to speed things up?

I would have thought the performance on a physical partition would be better compared to a virtual filesystem in a flat file container. But obviously it's quite the opposite

Even moderate file access seems to slow down the host massively, causing OS X to become very unresponsive.

[admin]

We're only talking about a Boot Camp partition here, things like HGFS shared folders aren't in the picture, right?

I would have thought the performance on a physical partition would be better compared to a virtual filesystem in a flat file container. But obviously it's quite the opposite

I don't know of any benchmarks showing this, but I think this is true. Somewhat counterintuitively, normal virtual machines typically have better disk performance than Boot Camp virtual machines. There are a couple reasons, including that Apple's raw disk I/O paths aren't optimized, and that SCSI (used by many normal virtual machine types) is a nicer protocol to virtualize than IDE, and that (with the right setting) a normal virtual disk can be buffered.