I recently bought a ssd, and i'm wondering if running a windows virtual machine will do a lot of writing or it's mainly reads?
I thought using a 32G SD card (SanDisk extreme plus 80m/s read and 60m/s write) to run the VM without wearing out the ssd. Since my card reader is on PCI, it should perform just as if it was installed on a HDD (60m/s write), right? Also i'm thinking on setting a swap partition on SD card since i did not set a swap partition on SSD, is that advised?
Thanks in advance.
42 Answers
Do not set a swap partition on the SD card. If you are running your host on an SSD then you don't need a swap partition, if you want one anyways it should be placed on a medium of equal to or higher speeds to prevent it from slowing down your system.
If you want to run a Windows vm off an sd card you can do so, but I would be wary of poor performance. The card you listed sounds fast, but often times cards don't get the max speed across the entire card. I tried to find the product page for your card and this is the page I found:
The first thing I read when visiting the product page was "With read speeds as fast as 80MB/s", which suggests that at times you will experience lower speeds and there is no guarantee that you will ever see the 80MB/s. However this card is intended for use in devices that do several MB/s writes so you may be okay. I would not advise it though. VMs often don't get the full device performance which will amplify any short comings.
As I know, VirtualBox does not use swap, it always use RAM. So, swap will be used for other applications. I don't think you need swap with 8Gb RAM. It would be better to buy more RAM if it's not enough.
To achieve maximum speed on reed/write operations you need some additional filesystem parameters to be set on SD-card. I did it myself using this guide . But, comparing with HDD the speed will be lower.
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