Running images off of USB devices

C

CdtDelta

Bit poster
Hey all,
I currently run all my Parallels (and VMWare images for that matter) off of an external USB LaCie ruggedized hard drive. What I would ideally like to do is move my Parallels images to either an Express Card flash drive (example Lexar 16GB ExpressCard drive) or a USB flash drive (like the Corsair 32GB one for example).
Now the performance on my LaCie drive is great, almost as fast as running the images directly off of my MacBook Pro drive. However a couple of months ago I started playing around with moving my images to a USB stick or a ExpressCard drive, and the performance took a nose dive. On the USB stick (again the Cosair one is the one I used) it would take literally 30 minutes from "power on" of the image to get to the logon screen (Windows XP). It was really unusable. The expresscard drive wasn't much better, so I ended up going back to my LaCie drive.
So what I was wondering is if anyone else has tried this and seen the same results, or if it's something with running the image off of an external drive versus flash media that's causing the problem. It seems like I should get a little bit better performance off of flash media than the hard drive.
What I'm basically looking to do is "untie" myself from the external drive, but not use up my MacBook Pro's hard drive space either. So if anyone has any other suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Thanks ahead of time...
 
Ok, but that's not really what I'm looking for. I want to go with either an ExpressCard or a USB stick, not something else to carry around. I'm trying to go more portability here.
 
All flash media at the present, speaking in particular about the memory sticks etc., are pretty slow. For storage or read only it's not so much of a problem but trying to run a VM on one would be a real pain. Why not simply get the newer 320gb or the upcoming 500gb laptop hard drives instead. In my mind the cost benefit ratio is far higher and you can leave the backup images stored at home on your spare.
 
Because it would cost more to have my hard drive swapped out than just put my images on a USB stick or ExpressCard.
Guess I'll have to wait for flash to catch up then...
 
You might try a fast flash drive with dual channel architecture that might help I highly recommend the one by OCZ. You would be amazed on its read and write speed. Very fast. Best of luck

http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_atv_turbo_usb_2_0_flash_drive

atvturbo1_big.jpg
 
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