virtualbox.org

I have looked everywhere and i must be missing this. I am switching my life over to Linux but there are some programs that i still need to run on windows because Linux wont run them. I have 2 SSD's currently both 1TB drives one has Ubuntu Gnome and the other has windows 10. Lately windows hasn't been playing nice with the dual boot setup. Causing many many crashes while in the middle of running programs. I am looking to use 1 SSD for the main Ubuntu os and then run Windows 10 in a virtual machine from the second SSD. I know windows and many of the programs eat drive space so want to keep them separate as much as possible. I have done a ton of reading but just want to get as much info as possible before i start over and go for this. i have read about the raw drive and just want to make sure this is the best way to go about this. I will be running Ubuntu 15.10 as the main OS

Im running
ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX
AMD FD8350
32 gig of Kingston HyperX FURY DDR3
Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB (MAIN DRIVE)
Crucial M500 960GB SATA (want to use for Virtual OS)
an old WD 1tb drive
ASUS R9 270X 4GB GDDR5

Without knowing what the programs are no one can tell you if it will work properly.

I can tell you that you need to read, and then read again the manual on RAW access. Below is a link to the online help section you need.

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#rawdisk

You should also make sure that you install the official version from virtualbox.org and not the Ubuntu fork they have available in the software center because we do not support their version.

I would rethink this and simply put the Windows 10 VM's FILEs (that is the .VBOX and .VDI disk files) on the second SSD and not give the guest RAW access to the second SSD. Raw access is fraught with peril and can screw up a disk pretty quick.

So install Virtualbox on the main SSD, then setup the VM so that the files for it actually reside on the second SSD.

I know that VM's run from an SSD are wonderfully fast. I have a Windows 7 VM I keep around because it has a compiler on it that I don't care to move to the host. It ran pretty awful on the HDD I originally had, it runs like a champ after I switched to an SSD.