Shouldn't I be able to run a VM from a USB 3.0 Flash Drive

cis4life said:

Good Day,

I purchased a Cosair 256gb USB 3.0 Flash Drive. It connects with no issue, but when I tried to run a windows 8 VM (4gb of ram dedicated to the VM), it ran EXTREMELY SLOW.

Should I be able to run a VM from this USB drive?

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Not seeing you machine spec? presumably it's also USB3? if so, odd because I have had few issues running VMS from memory sticks let alone Flash.

Have you tried running the vm from a local drive? or run benchmarks software against the flash drive to make sure it's up to spec?

^^ I'll echo what AtomicGreg stated. First, benchmark the USB3 device using something like Black Magic to get a feel for its performance. Second, test the VM on internal storage.

I don't run VMs from USB3, but I have run one from an SD card with "ok" performance. With that said I'm going to test running a VM from my USB3 flash drive (32 gig Sandisk Extreme) as well as run Black Magic against it. Will report back when done.

I copied 12 gig worth of Ubuntu VM to my flash drive and ran a few things - firefox, software updater (downloaded 114 meg), rebooted etc. It's not as fast as internal storage, but it's not slow either.

Attached is the result of running Black Magic.