Virtulisation on the Air.

[iann1982]

Just wondered if anyone had any advice on how best to organise my iTunes / Parallels installs on my Air.

I'm currently running 2 different Parallels machines, one with XP IE6 on (bootcamp), and one with Windows 7 / IE8 on. This machine's my primary work machine and although almost all of my work's done in OS X, I need to keep a boot camp partition in case I have to work on a clients windows network.

Does anyone know if these can safely be stored on a flash drive? Will they still boot? I realise using a macbook's easier for this, but you just can't beat the air for traveling..

 

[MikeDTyke]

Just wondered if anyone had any advice on how best to organise my iTunes / Parallels installs on my Air.

I'm currently running 2 different Parallels machines, one with XP IE6 on (bootcamp), and one with Windows 7 / IE8 on. This machine's my primary work machine and although almost all of my work's done in OS X, I need to keep a boot camp partition in case I have to work on a clients windows network.

Does anyone know if these can safely be stored on a flash drive? Will they still boot? I realise using a macbook's easier for this, but you just can't beat the air for traveling..

It can be done, however a flash drive will fail very quickly. They aren't durable enough for so many writes. The parallel's virtual disk is one big file which will change every time you boot it up. It' also includes the windows pagefile which is constantly being written.

I would recommend a small bus powered USB drive like the Western Digital Passport drives. About the size of a packet of cards, comes with a tiny usb cable for power and data, easy to slip into a laptop bag.

Cheers.

M.

 

[rhyx]

It can be done, however a flash drive will fail very quickly. They aren't durable enough for so many writes. The parallel's virtual disk is one big file which will change every time you boot it up. It' also includes the windows pagefile which is constantly being written.

I would recommend a small bus powered USB drive like the Western Digital Passport drives. About the size of a packet of cards, comes with a tiny usb cable for power and data, easy to slip into a laptop bag.

Cheers.

M.

Can you post some references?

The WHOLE file does not change every bootup. If it did you would have horribly long times waiting for a VM to load. Hard drives are written to in sectors. It is very doubtful that EVERY sector containing pieces of that file are changed.

 

[Fonzijr1964]

Can you post some references?

The WHOLE file does not change every bootup. If it did you would have horribly long times waiting for a VM to load. Hard drives are written to in sectors. It is very doubtful that EVERY sector containing pieces of that file are changed.

we are talking about flash here not a HDD or even a SSD

 

[rhyx]

we are talking about flash here not a HDD or even a SSD

Oh, he's nuts as anything if he is using a Flash USB key. Those are notoriously unreliable no matter what the brand.

 

[Fonzijr1964]

Oh, he's nuts as anything if he is using a Flash USB key. Those are notoriously unreliable no matter what the brand.

yep