Hello, guys. I'm having a problem with running my virtual machines through my HDD Enclosure. I use eSata and the drive itself is SATAII. It's more than great when i use it like a normal external.. copying files, backups.. the usual... get about 85-95 mb/sec transfers. So i thought to move my machines over to it. However when i run any virtual machine (i use both XP and 7) they all are VERY slow. I've noticed through observing my hdd lights that Vmware kind of "caches" the stuff on my main hard drive and only then writes it to the external, so it actually makes my machines pretty much unusable if i happen to do anything at all on my host (thought it'll run faster without interfering with my main OS and in theory it SHOULD run faster) They all run great on my main drive.. i just decided to move them over because they do use a lot of HDD both space wise and time wise.. and i run multiple things at a time so wanted to leave my main drive alone so to speak. So i'm very confused by this.. have tried different settings with hdd caches both the external and my main.. no difference. I normally use write-cache and disable the flushing on both hard drives.. but i have played around with Quick removal on the external and while it makes it on average 10-15 mb/sec slower in regular transfer rates it didn't really affect the virtual machines.
So please let me know if i'm doing smth wrong here? i'm not sure but i thought i tried running machines like that through virtualbox a while back and it worked just fine.. only used the external drive. And i have tried to move the entire machine folder onto the drive with all of its files.. no difference.
BTW my system is Windows 7 x64 VMware Workstation 9.01. I run both 32 and 64 bit virtuals. same result each time. Even tried giving the machine the whole drive as physical... the same story. Maybe i need to edit something in the .vmx file? Would appreciate any thoughts.
Thanks in advance.