El Capitan, VMWare Fusion 8.0.1, running Guest OS on USB 3.0 Stick

[llanito]

Hello, sorry if this has been asked before.  I have a Windows 10 virtual machine disk setup on a USB 3.0 Kingston Data Traveller.  2 Processor cores, 4GB RAM.

The performance is woeful.

I am running the latest Mac OS and sometimes the virtual machine zips along but then sometimes it just hangs and I get the spinning beach ball.  It seems to be the read/write on the USB stick which is no way near the supposed performance of the USB stick.

This also affects the host Mac as well which is really unusual and I have to force quit VMWare, I have sent the crash reports to them.

Any ideas, suggestions?

Thanks,

Adrian.

Edit: Just had a pop up Hard: DDE Error on the VM

[wila]

Hi Adrian,

I'm sorry to say that USB sticks do not really work well for running VM's.

The claimed performance never really makes it in real life and the hangs etc.. that you are seeing are not that uncommon.

I have tried a few and so far none really worked well, USB disks tend to work better.

PS: I fail to see how a DDE error is related, you might want to verify the disk of your VM from within the guest OS. Especially as you mention you have shut it down hard a few times. To clarify that, I mean that it is possible that disk corruption from your hard shut downs has caused disk corruption which can trigger unpredictable results.

--

Wil

[Woodmeister50]

Vendors for USB Flash drives all play a smoke and mirrors numbers game.  Some of those

"amazing" numbers that they quote are in reality for short, burst mode type of transactions.

They can never really maintain those transfer rates for any length of time, especially writes

which on most are still snail slow by today's standards.

If you want performance in a USB Stick form factor, there are true SSD drives that are that small

now, and the price isn't that far off from similarly sized USB Flash technology.

(See http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/external-drives/OWC/Envoy-Pro-mini)