running vm on external drive (usb 2.0)

[c55]

How do virtual machines do on external drives with the mac mini 2011? it has usb 2.0. I would only be running windows 10 preview, no heavy apps just web browsing and testing out a couple of things. I am running the win 10 preview in virtualbox on my iMac right now but it's all on the main hard drive not external so not sure if it would make a huge performance impact or not.

 

[yjchua95]

How do virtual machines do on external drives with the mac mini 2011? it has usb 2.0. I would only be running windows 10 preview, no heavy apps just web browsing and testing out a couple of things. I am running the win 10 preview in virtualbox on my iMac right now but it's all on the main hard drive not external so not sure if it would make a huge performance impact or not.

Really really badly, if it's over USB 2.0. Don't even think about it.

If it's on a USB 3 (with UASP support) drive over a USB 3 port, the performance is pretty decent.

 

[dkl]

Don't bother with USB 2.

 

[ixxx69]

How do virtual machines do on external drives with the mac mini 2011? it has usb 2.0. I would only be running windows 10 preview, no heavy apps just web browsing and testing out a couple of things...

If it's really just to test/check some things out on W10, then usb2 will do in a pinch, it'll just be slow to get going. It would be pretty frustrating for regular use.

 

[MRrainer]

I certainly wouldn't run W10.
But if you have something very low on I/O, it should be OK-ish.
E.g. things like a Live-CD (if the ISO is on the main hard-disk, of course) or related stuff like pfSense, which can run read-only from an USB-stick.