Laptop hard drive for virtual machines (using VMware Workstation)

I am planning to attach a second hard drive to my laptop using a hard drive caddy in place of the DVD drive. I plan to create and use virtual machines (VMs) off this second hard drive using VMware workstation 7.0.

I cannot afford a solid state drive right now. Since virtual machines involve a decent amount of I/O operations, I am trying to identify the best hard drive option that will help speed up disk access times when i am running my VMs (3 VMs at one time).

The only two options I see are -
1) a seagate hybrid drive 5400 rpm with 8 GB NAND.
2) a 7200 rpm laptop drive (my concern with this is heat generation and failure rate).

Will the hybrid drive with 8 GB NAND provide better IO compared to the 7200 rpm drive?

 

The 7200 RPM drive is your best option - heat generation and failure rate is equivalent to 5400 RPM models (this is a mature tech).

The responsiveness of your VM's can be up to 60% faster than the potentially (benchmarks) faster, but ultimately slower and more expensive option.

If 500GB is enough capacity for you, I would recommend this drive:

See:
WD 500GB Scorpio Black 7200rpm SATA II Notebook HDD w/ 16MB Cache at Memory Express



Depending on the size of your VM's: you do know that almost any SSD will give you 10x the performance or more when running VM's for just a few dollars more, right?

See:
Crucial M4 2.5in SATA III Solid State Drive, 128GB at Memory Express

See:
Sandisk Solid State Drive, 128GB at Memory Express

See:
Intel SSD 530 Series SATA III Solid State Drive, 120GB at Memory Express



(If you do go with an SSD solution: make sure you take into consideration the 30% capacity that you should leave as 'unallocated' to keep the performance and the health of the drive as high as possible for as long as possible (sustained, over time).




Hope this helps.


Good luck.

 

Booting VMs from SSD compared to HDD is like a day and night. I can boot 4 VMs simultaneously without any hiccups, haven't tried more.

 

Pretty much what tilleroftheearth and CyberTronics said - an SSD is a perfect match for VMs. A Scorpio Black is good for 1 VM (barely), but running three is suicide .

Also, a smaller SSD will still be better than a large HDD - the larger the virtual machine, the slower it will be, while an SSD will provide decent performance. The best way to get the best of both worlds is to create 2 virtual disks - a system virtual disk that sits on the SSD and a storage virtual disk that you can store on a hard drive.

I don't know, maybe you could consider a refurbished or lightly used SSD if you want more space for cheap - even an older X25 G2 will be way better than a hard drive...

 

That sounds fantastic!! I am aware of performance gains with SSD.....but booting 4 VMs simultaneously!!??? That is like a whole new level. I boot up my VMs one at a time...but then my system is suspended when not in use so i do not have to deal often with shutting down VMs.

My 3 VMs including multiple snapshots occupy about 130 GB and with a couple of new Windows Server 2012 VMs i will be creating soon, it will not be long before i hit the 220+ GB disk utilization. So ideally i would like to have a 512 GB SSD drive and that is expensive! Well...I guess i will have to invest in a Crucial or Intel 256 GB SSD.

The other reason i asked the above question is because i read that Seagate is stopping production of 7200 rpm drives and so it made me wonder if the hybrid drives would be a good choice. Article - Seagate to Cease Production of 7200rpm Mobile Hard Drives This Year - X-bit labs

I was not able to find any benchmarks/comparison between 7200 rpm drives and hybrid drives.

On a 256 GB SSD, i expect to grow from current 130 GB all the way to 200-220 GB disk utilization (all VMs only). But leaving 30% as recommended by tilleroftheearth i should ideally be utilizing 180 GB.

I guess i will have to stop allocating all disk space during creations of VMs. I usually use a single file vmdk and allocate it completely (typically 30-40 GB based on requirements). I have been doing this to prevent fragmentation.

If i use an SSD and have my new VM disks grow dynamically instead of a complete initial allocation i am going to have to deal with fragmentation but it seems it is not a good idea to defrag SSDs - http://helpdeskgeek.com/featured-posts/should-you-defrag-an-ssd/

Cybertronics - I am curious to know if you are allocating all disk space to your VMs or do the disks grow dynamically?

 

But do you need the VMs to have a single virtual disk? Because if you go the multiple virtual disk route, you can get a smaller SSD for the system installation and put any other files (large files, non-essential programs, etc.) on a large hard drive in a separate virtual disk (you can easily connect/disconnect them in Workstation).

 

I did think about your suggestion to split my data but i do not have any large files to really separate out except for the DB server.

VM1 - Windows 2008 domain controller. VM2 - Windows 2008 with Office, Office Server, and Visual Studio 2010. (this is the dev box used to write scripts and develop code). VM3 - SQL server 2008 system. This will have the most benefit with being on the SSD. These are all single 40 GB VM disks so no fragmentation issues. Upcoming development VMs are going to be Windows 2012 with an application server and another with SQL 2012.

I will pick up a 256 GB SSD for the SQL server VMs and the new VMs with dynamic disk allocation instead of fixed disk allocation. I just researched that a fragmented SSD is still very fast and there is no need to defrag it (defraging reduces life of an SSD!).

I will leave my other VMs on my main drive. As much as i would love to have all VMs on the SSD, this setup should still give me a big improvement over my current setup with all VMs on my 5400 rpm drive.

Now I am just waiting to setup everything and then boot all VMs on the SSD simultaneously!

 

Yes, SSDs are not susceptible to fragmentation issues, which is why they're perfect for virtual machines.
I hope you have a good processor and enough RAM, though - I can comfortably run 2 virtual machines from the SSD with 8 GB of RAM, but start another one and things start to noticeably slow down. Page file on the SSD helps a lot in this case.