Saturday, June 21, 2008

Flash Drive your VPC's?

Joe's Blog - Speeding up your Virtual PC (VPC) Machines with a Flash USB drive

"...The thought of me carrying on the airplane 20 2.5 inch USB hard drives just didn’t appeal to me.  Enter the USB Flash drive approach.  I tested a Patriot 32 gb USB Flash by placing the VHD on it and the Virtual Machine Configuration file (VMC) on the C : drive pointing to the VHD on the USB Flash.  The undo file will then by default go on the same drive as the VMC file.  Launching the vpc and operations like loading the AX 2009 interface, which by design also JITs Office SharePoint, where well over twice as fast under the single drive approach.

The write speed of the USB Flash is terrible; however, the read speed is around 10 mbs (faster than most 2.5 drives).  In this scenario read speed was all we were concerned with since all writes took place on the local C: drive.  There was also the added bonus that no classroom setup was required.  All that was needed was a machine as it is normally delivered from the factory.  I then signed out the USB drives to the students, they inserted them and setup the vmc file on the local hard drive, if needed VPC 2007 was also on the USB Flash.

...

Flash Class"

This is something I'm really going to have to try. I dig the idea of having a library of flash drive's with different VPC's on them. Simple and easy to carry, good performance and pretty cool.

Now all I need are some big flash drives (I think my biggest is like 256MB... LOL...)

(via yag: Community and Architecture - Cool! VPC and USB)

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