Mobile VM

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Wasaga Willy

Bit poster
Is it possible to have the windows vm on an external hard drive?

The reason I'm asking is that I currently carry a laptop between my office and the home office and am sick of the daily routine of setting up and tearing down the laptop.

I will have a mac at the office and at home and would like to carry an external firewire hard drive between the two locations instead.

Anyone doing this? Is it possible, practicable?
 
Yes, it is possible. I do this for work also; however, I use a USB hard drive.

Make sure the firewire drive is fast for virtual performance. The specs for a drive I use would be:
- Firewire 800 (preferred) or 400
- 7200 rpm Drive
- 16mb Cache

This would give you the best performance especially Firewire 800... You need to make sure your Mac also supports FW800 for a FW800 drive. Otherwise FW 400 should work fine.

Also if you have a virtual machine on a external drive make sure you have enough room for the virtual memory file that gets stored when the VM is running. For example:

A 30gb Virtual Hard Disk has 1gb of RAM associated to it should be running on a external drive with about 45gb, because when it is formated it will have enough room for the 30gb virtual machine and the 1gb RAM File Parallels creates some times (it creates for me when I have the virtual machine running and give OS X priority to memory)

Thanks,
Christopher Zenzel
 
Thanks for the reply Christopher,
The iMac has a FW800 port on the back so I am assuming that it should work. How do you find the speed of the VM running on USB? Do you find the drive faster than you are when your working?
 
Wasaga Willy said:
Thanks for the reply Christopher,
The iMac has a FW800 port on the back so I am assuming that it should work. How do you find the speed of the VM running on USB? Do you find the drive faster than you are when your working?
Click to expand...

I find the speed of USB 2.0 kind of sluggish especially with Parallels Desktop 3 when running application such as Development Tools.

I use Firewire 800 when I can. USB 2 should be find for the general Office applications, but if you are gaming or using Visual Studio, or other disk intensive applications I would go with FW800.

If you are just using it to transfer documents and read e-mail USB 2 should work fine, speed-wise. Take warning when using Vista. That is a disk hog itself ;-).

Thanks,
Christopher Zenzel
 
Thanks, information noted.
We're steering clear of Vista at the office and everywhere else for that matter. XP Pro all the way, if it has to be windows. I'm slowly changing us over to the Mac and for all those apps that are only available we'll use parallels.

Regards, Klaus
 
don't want to hijack this thread but I'm about to make the move to Mac and buy parallels - read this with interest. I've two 40GB drives and one 250 GB (USB) - from your comment the former are both too small to run XP + a couple of PC apps - if I understand your response !!??
 
30 GB is typically enough for XP, more than that is only usually needed if you work with large files (drawings, documents, images) in the same partition as XP and/or you plan to archive media files in that partition. But since you're running Parallels, chances are you have those stored in your Mac side of the force.
 
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