[SOLVED] External SSD hard drive for VM

[n.hussain8606]

Just after some guidance really. So I have a Dell XPS 9560 Laptop hooked to a dock and 2 monitors.I run a VM on my machine all the the time basically, its a work VM so stays on most the time.

I work inside the VM often so of course that means data being added and changes being written to disk. The virtualisation is all Hyper-V and I think the HyperV add's a little extra data to the disk for checkpoints etc as well. Current the VM's disk are stored on the same drive as the Host OS, i have issues at time with storage space.

I currently have network drive connect to a raspberry Pi, you can run the VM over that but it runs badly, too slow to be of any use. So I was considering get an external hard drive just to store the VM's disk on there connected via USB directly to the dock that I use. The dock is connected via the thunderbolt port, the ports are USB3.0. In theory with an SSD I should be able to get 4gbps transfer speeds quite easily over the USB3.0 and then the thunderbolt port. I may not be able to use the full 500MB/s of read/write for the SSD however the VM should perform the same as it is right now while sharing the host's disk which is good enough for me.

Is my theory right here or am I missing something, is there any other similar ways that I could get high performance storage connected directly to dock.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you use the fastest external connection you have and an SSD disk for that external drive, it should run OK. You can use the external drive for backups also even if you don't see any speed boost.