Windows 8 VM on a Flash Drive

[CebuJ]

Hi All,

So, I've been working for a few months, with a Windows 8.1 VM on my Mac OSX Maverick laptop. The host (my mac) has 8GB of Ram and I've had no problems with either the VM or my mac.

Recently I decided that I wanted to free up space on my hard drive so I decided to experiment and make a copy of my existing VM to use on my 64GB flash drive instead. The new vm copy has the same specs as the original on my hard drive (2gb of ram etc.)

I've noticed that the new copy VM now living on my flash drive is unbearably slow. Every little thing takes forever to process, even opening up menus or trying to go to the "tile view" of windows 8, etc.

I'm not really surprised by this, but I wanted to know if this was normal behavior or if there is something I should have done differently. If it matters, I made the copy by "exporting" my original VM file to my flash drive and them re importing it to Virtualbox.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I also have an external hard drive I could try but I figured it would be more convenient to use a flash drive that I can easily leave inside my laptop.

Thanks

[loukingjr]

how is your flash drive formatted? I assume you may have an SSD on your Mac which would be faster than a thumb drive. even a USB 3.0 thumb drive,

[CebuJ]

how is your flash drive formatted? I assume you may have an SSD on your Mac which would be faster than a thumb drive. even a USB 3.0 thumb drive,

Hi,

In order to avoid the size limitations of FAT32, I formatted the flash drive to the mac osx journal format.

Do you think that could be the problem?

[loukingjr]

how is your flash drive formatted? I assume you may have an SSD on your Mac which would be faster than a thumb drive. even a USB 3.0 thumb drive,

Hi,

In order to avoid the size limitations of FAT32, I formatted the flash drive to the mac osx journal format.

Do you think that could be the problem?

I would think not. Seeing your Mac is formatted the same way. One thing I have always noticed is USB thumb drives seem to read and write slowly. If it's USB 2, and you do have an internal SSD drive, the internal drive will be at least 100(1000?) times faster reading and writing. What you might want to do is install the VM on your external drive and see how it performs there and keep the USB flash drive just for occasions when you want to take your laptop somewhere. I don't have a large thumb drive to test otherwise I could check.

btw, running an OS off a USB 2 thumb drive is like running an OS from a CD as far as speed goes.

[CebuJ]

Yeah I get what you're saying. I thought something like would probably be the case but figured it was worth a shot. I'll try my luck with an external HDD.

Thanks for the info!

[loukingjr]

Yeah I get what you're saying. I thought something like would probably be the case but figured it was worth a shot. I'll try my luck with an external HDD.

Thanks for the info!

welcome