Running Windows 7 (in Parallels) from SD card?

[petrucci666]

Is running W7 off of a SD Card too slow?

I'm running Parallels 7 (installed on the Mac) with Lion 10.7.3.

Since I have an MBA with 128GB, so disk space is precious. That's why I want to run W7 off of a SD card. I'd do it on an external hard drive but lugging it around is kinda painful.


Thanks!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Possible, but you need a fast SD card for that, as typical and cheap SD cards offer no more than 10 to 20 MB/s read speeds, which will be a drag. You need to look at Class 10 cards at least.

 

[teddynewell]

I have the same question - could you let us know the results if you try it?

 

[brendu]

I am also curious about this if anyone has done it and can weigh in...

 

[Sincci]

Running Windows via bootcamp is not possible with SD-cards since Windows only boots from internal harddrives (and ssd's), but you can of course put your virtual machine image in the sd-card (or usb-stick or external harddrive) and run it from there. It might be a little slow with sd-card though..

 

[petrucci666]

Running Windows via bootcamp is not possible with SD-cards since Windows only boots from internal harddrives (and ssd's), but you can of course put your virtual machine image in the sd-card (or usb-stick or external harddrive) and run it from there. It might be a little slow with sd-card though..

I tried it, worked great. Except, my SD card was a Class 4 card so it was fairly slow running Windows 7. You should get a 32GB Class 10 (or above) SD card and it'll work great.

 

[brendu]

How well would this card work? Would it seem (speed wise) as if it was running from the regular HDD?

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-45MB-32GB-SDSDX-032G-AFFP/dp/B007M54E1M/ref=pd_cp_e_1

 

[petrucci666]

How well would this card work? Would it seem (speed wise) as if it was running from the regular HDD?

http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extreme-45MB-32GB-SDSDX-032G-AFFP/dp/B007M54E1M/ref=pd_cp_e_1

Yes, that would work just fine.

Also, as mentioned above, this won't work with BootCamp. It will work with Parallels.

 

[brendu]

Yeah I only want it for parallels, thanks for the help.

 

[throAU]

In general use, 20-30mb/sec is probably fine, given that the SD card has zero seek time.

Sure it won't be fast at streaming IO, but most PC use isn't doing that.

I'll wager that comparing on-paper numbers of the SD card IO to a hard drive doesn't tell the whole story.