virtualbox.org

Hi,

What is the recommended controller to be used for the virtual Hard drive? Among the 4 possible choices available in VirtualBox Harddisk settings:
- IDE
- SATA (AHCI)
- SCSI (LsiLogic)
- SCSI (BusLogic)

In practice, is there any difference? If possible can you please explain why a particular controller is recommended?

Thanks in advance for any help.

What Guest are you going to use? For XP and before, use IDE because it doesn't have the SATA driver shipped with it. The SCSI controllers were added for VMWare conversion compatibility. It doesn't really matter which one you pick, it might differ 1 or 2 MB/s transfer rate, which is within a margin of error.

I mainly use Windows guests (2003, 2008, 7 in x32 and x64). I usually install Intel Matrix Storage driver from Intel to be able to use SATA (on Win 2003). I have read somewhere that SATA helps to make the VM less resource consuming b/c SATA has less overhead than IDE. In reality, I cannot see the difference between various virtual hardware (virtual network adapter and HD controler).

Quite the contrary I wonder if installing the Intel drivers for SATA or the Intel Pro/1000 network adapter would consume extra resources for no obvious gain.

I was hoping that someone had accurate measures or experience on these virtual Hardware so that will save me times to avoid fine tuning negligible parameters.

There have been benchmarks here. If you search this particular part of the forum, you will find it. It did note that SATA was a tad faster than IDE. SCSI wasn't tested because it wasn't available at that time.
As for the Intel/PRO driver, only the MT Desktop is not shipped with Windows by default, the others are (or at least the T Server).