Windows 7 disk IO performance with "Shared profile"

T

TimoI

Bit poster
Hi,

I just installed Parallels Desktop 6 on Snow Leopard with Windows 7. I am planning to do software development using Visual Studio and I am wondering what would be the most performant way to configure my virtual machine from disk IO point of view (emphasis on fast random file read and write, not the throughput). I have now a normal HDD but planning to upgrade to SSD at some point.

Options:
1) Use "Shared profile" -configuration option - With this option I think the "My documents" in windows would physically be in the OSX user folder and Windows will access the files using a network share \\pfs\Home...

2) Do not use shared profile - My Visual Studio code and compilation files would be stored on the Parallels Virtual hard drive

3) Create a physical partition for windows VM


Does anyone has idea or done benchmarks on how these options affect on experienced disk performance? The option 3 is probably fastest and 1) the slowest. But I like the option 1) because that way I would have all my files in one place and could easily (?) switch the virtual machines with different os/software installed.

Thanks!
 
Ok. Some really anecdotal benchmark results. I compiled some old C# solution with 26 projects and a lot of files with Visual Studio 2010 from both Os X home directory (Shared profile) and from the virtual machine virtual hard disk.

Compile times:
Shared profile directory: 22 seconds
Virtual hard disk: 17 seconds

I dont know how much of the elapsed time was IO and how much CPU.
 
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