Mobile VM storage

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pcgeek86

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 14, 2007
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Hey guys, I am a traveling consultant, and am interested in finding some large, external, fast, inexpensive, bus-powered storage to run virtual machines off of in VMware Workstation 7.0.

I purchased an 880GB Seagate USB 2.0 drive from Best Buy (2.5" bus-powered), but it's horrifyingly slow when executing even just one VM off of it. It's painful, but much, much faster to run the VMs off of my internal hard drive, but it's not large enough to store everything I need to on it.

I am equipped with a Dell Latitude E6400, which has an eSATA port on it (yay!), and I am planning on purchasing an eSATA enclosure this weekend from my local Frys store. That said, I could probably use a 2nd drive simultaneously, but only have 1 eSATA port.

Is there any hardware out there that would let me mobile-ly (without carrying around a power supply) convert my single eSATA port into multiple?

Cheers
 
pcgeek86 said:
Hey guys, I am a traveling consultant, and am interested in finding some large, external, fast, inexpensive, bus-powered storage to run virtual machines off of in VMware Workstation 7.0.

I purchased an 880GB Seagate USB 2.0 drive from Best Buy (2.5" bus-powered), but it's horrifyingly slow when executing even just one VM off of it. It's painful, but much, much faster to run the VMs off of my internal hard drive, but it's not large enough to store everything I need to on it.

I am equipped with a Dell Latitude E6400, which has an eSATA port on it (yay!), and I am planning on purchasing an eSATA enclosure this weekend from my local Frys store. That said, I could probably use a 2nd drive simultaneously, but only have 1 eSATA port.

Is there any hardware out there that would let me mobile-ly (without carrying around a power supply) convert my single eSATA port into multiple?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Without external power? no.

How much space do you really need?

Startech makes a dual 2.5in drive with single eSATA, but it has a power connector.
But you could put two vRaptor 300gb drives in RAID0 and it would be really fast
 
Well, the issue with power connectors is that I need to be able to take them on the plane with me when I'm traveling, and I'm constantly moving between the office and my hotel.

The reason I need a fair amount of space, is because VMs quickly chew up space, especially operating systems like Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows 7, etc. Additionally, the enterprise applications I'm working with take up a lot of space, too, such as SQL 2008, ConfigMgr 2007, and so on.

Any recommended portable drives without power? That's probably the top priority requirement, then performance, then size. I was also hoping to have extensibility, so I could hook up multiple external drives.

Cheers
 
Seeing that you only have a single eSATA port then you are going to have to move to USB.
Do the 6400's have FW800?

Do you run multiple VMs at the same time? If you do and try to do that on a single disks your are going to be IO bound and have serious disk contention issues.
But you could buy a couple of these Seagate HDDs
And these enclosures
 
Yes there is a Firewire 800 on the Latitude E6400, although I don't know how much better than would perform than USB 2.0. I've already tried using my 880GB USB 2.0 drive, but it's terribly slow, practically unusable.

I'm thinking eSATA is the best route, but I wonder if I can have more than one eSATA drive? Like a port replicator of sorts?
 
pcgeek86 said:
Yes there is a Firewire 800 on the Latitude E6400, although I don't know how much better than would perform than USB 2.0. I've already tried using my 880GB USB 2.0 drive, but it's terribly slow, practically unusable.

I'm thinking eSATA is the best route, but I wonder if I can have more than one eSATA drive? Like a port replicator of sorts?
Click to expand...

Yes there are port multipliers but you will need external power.
There is simply not enough current on eSATA for more than one drive.
 
Great, well thanks for the help. I kinda figured that would be the answer, but wanted to make sure I had exhausted my options. I'll just make sure I get the biggest / best performing drive that I can, for my eSATA enclosure.

Cheers,
Trevor Sullivan
 
Use the modular bay to put a 2nd hard drive where the DVD drive is.
Watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-V01PmnSRI

Then, store any iso files for CDs and DVDs you want (windows installation discs, etc.) on your main hard drive, so that when you are setting up a VM on the secondary drive it is not slow due to the hard drive having to read and write from the same drive.
 
Well, I'll at least keep my huge respository of OS / app installs on my 880GB USB 2.0 disk, because that's cheap, large storage. The big shortcoming is that it just lacks the performance to runs VMs off of.

The only problem I'm really trying to solve at this point is where to run VMs off of, and I guess I do like the idea of the modular bay HD. Thanks
 
I ended up purchasing a $30 eSATA / USB 2.0 enclosure at Fry's, along with a 320GB 7200RPM Western Digital Scorpio Black, which cost $100.

I tested the file copy speeds, and got around 65-70MB/sec sustained transfer rates (single, 16GB file), from my internal HD to the external one (via eSATA).

My Seagate 880GB drive got only 20-25MB/sec max sustained transfer rates, so the eSATA is definitely better, but I still feel a bit disappointed with the numbers.

Has anyone else gotten better performance from their eSATA disks? It's possible that my internal drive (160GB) is a 5400RPM disk, and could be inhibiting performance, but is there any easy way to find out? I'm guessing the best option would be to replace the internal one with a 7200 RPM as well, but I don't feel like spending the money on that, too. After all, this is work-related stuff.

Cheers,
Trevor Sullivan
 
My laptop is in sig.

I currently use Vantec 2.5" External. I can power via USB cable and when plugged in via USB (for power) and eSATA (for data), it works just fine. It IS only recognized at bootup. Probably an issue with BIOS.

I get about the same throughput as you (maybe a little higher, but haven't checked in a while), but don't need to carry a power cable.

My internal HDDs are 7200 RPM drives though as well as the one in the enclosure. I'm about to move to an SSD for boot drive and 640GB storage HDD (internal) and have another 640GB for additional storage.

 
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