System Recommendations

[RyanMoo]

Hello - I currently have a 2011 Macbook Pro 13" 2.3GHz i5 with 16GB RAM and 2 Solid State drives.

I run my Parallels instances off the 2nd hard drive and this configuration seems to work great.

I am considering upgrading to a 15" i7 2.3GHz 16GB RAM, but I see that the new 15" MBPs don't have room to easily install a 2nd hard drive.

My question is... how much will performance be affected if I install my VMs on my primary (SSD) hard drive? Will I gain enough by moving to an i7 to offset this performance degradation?

Thanks in advance

 

[Parallels User]

The CPU won't affect the performance, the difference between running two separate drives or just one is with concurrent I/O requests, from OS X and from the Guest VM, and that will be be the bottleneck, of sharing the bandwidth of one SSD interface. You'll only hit this bottleneck when you are running I/O intensive apps on both the Host and the Guest, that's where separate drives makes a difference.

However, the important difference between the older model and the newer is the PCIe-based SSD which is faster than the SATA interface, that's the thing that will probably actually make up the performance loss under certain loads.