Picking an SD Card for the Macbook Air 13

[Gregintosh]

I am thinking about running a Windows VM (via VMWare Fusion) from an SD card instead of keeping it installed on my Macbook.

First, it would save me space since I only have 128GB SSD, but also, I could then pop the SD card back into my iMac and access it via VMWare Fusion on there too, avoiding having to have 2 separate Windows installations.

I am wondering a few things about such high powered use though:

1. Would the SD card wear out very quickly? Or are SD cards kind of like SSD's where they will take years to wear out?

2. How do you pick the Speed/Class of an SD card? And does it really make a big difference?

3. Has anyone ran a VM from an SD card, and if so, what were your experiences (how fast was it, reliable, etc.)?

 

[jsolares]

I am thinking about running a Windows VM (via VMWare Fusion) from an SD card instead of keeping it installed on my Macbook.

First, it would save me space since I only have 128GB SSD, but also, I could then pop the SD card back into my iMac and access it via VMWare Fusion on there too, avoiding having to have 2 separate Windows installations.

I am wondering a few things about such high powered use though:

1. Would the SD card wear out very quickly? Or are SD cards kind of like SSD's where they will take years to wear out?

2. How do you pick the Speed/Class of an SD card? And does it really make a big difference?

3. Has anyone ran a VM from an SD card, and if so, what were your experiences (how fast was it, reliable, etc.)?

I wouldn't think to do it, SD is too slow 10MB/s for sequential access in the most common class 10.

You would probably need something like http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Flash...N262/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1315803894&sr=8-4 an at that price i'd rather be inconvenienced by an external usb2 disk.

 

[sloan47]

No matter how you go about it the SD card method is going to be dirt slow. The only way I'd recommend it is if you could offload your iTunes library (or other files you don't access much) to the SD card.

That or you just get an external USB drive and have much faster read/write speeds. You might be able to run a VM off of it but I'm unsure of how the performance would be. It would certainly be slow but maybe manageable.