Disk Storage for VMware Workstation

[optimus]

All,

I've been trying to build VM's on my machine, but whenever I get the 3rd VM running, it grinds to a halt, which I think is disk contention.

My Current Rig is:-

Q6600 Running at 2.7ghz
4GB RAM (PC6400)
1 x 250GB SATA Hard Drive (Think its an original SATA) it about 5 year old.

Do you think replacing this with a single Spinpoint 1TB F1, would make things a lot better, I know I should look at Raid 0, but its expensive.

Cheers

 

[HEADRAT]

I would say 1 disk per physical machine would be better.

Having 3 virtual and 1 physical machine accessing 1 physical disc is going to cause issues, remember the read/write head can only be in one place at once

 

[atomiser]

my motherboard has two sata controllers. i run a 160gb drive on one of the controllers for the host os, and then i run another 160gb drive on the other controller to host the vm's. i recently upgraded my 'media' drive from 500gb to 1tb as well, so the 500gb drive has been cascaded down into the vmware box too. if i need extra performance then i spread some of the vm's onto that as well. works a treat once you seperate out your guest machines from your host.