MacBook Pro is a 7200RPM faster

Is using a 7200 RPM drive with Paralles on MacBook Pro much faster? My Back bok has the slower 5400 drive. And it seems when parallels is running there is a lot of disk activity.

I use Parallels on an IMac and it seems much faster.

 

Hi,

How much memory do you have? If you only have 1Gb, increasing to 2 will make quite a dramatic difference before investing in a faster HD. Make sure you have at least 1 Gb more then the amount you have reserved for your virtual machines.

 

I run my VM off an external firewire HD

when there is a lot of disk activity it is either a scheduled ante virus scan or auto downloading WinXP and other updates

Hugh W

 

7200

I have 2 gig of ram. I have 1gig allocated to Parallels. It just seems like there is a lot of disk writting. I was just curious if a faster HD would make it faster.

It's a 2.33ghz, 2gig of ram with 100gig 5400rpm drive.

 

It's probably the dreaded index service.

More important in speed terms is having your VM in a different physical disk than your OSX system since otherwise you have two OSs competing for the same drive.

 

I have 4GB RAM, allocate 1536MB RAM to my VM in Parallels and run it all off a 160GB 7200rpm HDD. It flies.

In fact it runs Vista faster than my colleagues can on dedicated hardware. Definitely turn off indexing, restore points, hibernation and screensavers in the VM for added pep...

 

For optimization please also check this

1. Perform Mac and Windows side disk defragmentation http://www.xvsxp.com/system/system_tools_defrag.php
2. enable Intel VT-x support on Parallels Desktop -<Virtual Machine name>-Edit-Virtual Machine-Options -Advanced
3. Disable Themes in Windows XP serives.msc stop Themes service