6.0 Guest on External USB Drive SLOW

[greg4168]

Hi -

I'm using a Windows XP guest and a Vista Business host. The host is installed on the C drive, default folder location. The guest machine is on an external USB 2.0 IDE hard drive. The machine has 4gb RAM in it, of which I have 2.5 dedicated to the guest session. The host machine runs fine, but the guest machine is very slow, like an old 286 machine.

I notice that on the Vista host machine, the vmware-vmx.exe process is taking up around 27,000k memory, which sounds logical since that's about what I've dedicated to the guest session. The guest tasks don't look like anything out of the ordinary.

I'm not sure if the problem is using the USB for guest storage, or running an XP guest on a Vista host.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Greg.

[alelievre]

USB transfer rate is to poor to put a VM on it. Use IDE or SCSI.

[RDPetruska]

You'll get better feedback on the beta version in the Workstation 6 beta forum. http://www.vmware.com/community/forum.jspa?forumID=372

Please realize that (a) Workstation 6 beta has large amounts of debug code enabled right now, which will seriously impact performance; and (b) Vista is a pig, which seriously impacts performance.

[greg4168]

Thank you both!