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    L502x eSata questions.

    Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by MattM1121, Mar 24, 2011.

  1. MattM1121

    MattM1121 Notebook Enthusiast

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    Greetings,

    I can't seem to find any information/specs about the eSata configuration. For some of the work I'm doing I can get 4 VM's running. But of course disk I/O can be a problem.

    I want to move two VM's onto an eSata drive. However, I can't find any information about how the eSata is architected. Does it share the same Sata controller? If so then moving VM's off to an eSata device would be pointless.

    Does anyone have any info on this? Is anyone even using eSata?

    Thanks,

    -matt
     
    MattM1121, Mar 24, 2011
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  2. jataayu

    jataayu Notebook Enthusiast

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    I do use eSATA for my VMs. AFAIK, it shares the controller but how that would affect. It is the disk which is slow and not the controller. So having VMs on another disk, desktop 7200rpm should improve it.
     
    jataayu, Mar 24, 2011
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  3. daver160

    daver160 Notebook Deity

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    I can't say for certain that my case is similar to yours, but I run upwards of 3 VMs concurrently on my SXPS 1645 at work. each VM has 1 allocated processor, and 1GB of RAM (Win XP, Solaris, Red Hat).

    all the VMs are stored on a Seagate 1.5TB 7200RPM + ThermalTake DuetX docking station connected via eSATA, and i don't have any problems accessing them all at the same time. mind you, i'm not doing any heavy data I/O in my VMs, just development testing and such.

    the only problem i've had with eSATA is unrelated to your issue, so I think it's safe to migrate your VM from local to external. of course you can always switch back if you run into trouble.

    hope that helps, but again, this is on a different machine with an older motherboard.
     
    daver160, Mar 24, 2011
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