My hard drive speed, or not enough power in my USB hub that causes 2 VM to crash?

glacier922 · #1 07-26-2017

I can't for the life of me get more than one VM to run smoothly. If I do too much, then I'll get that circular rainbow thing on the Mac, and then sometimes the hard drive ejects. Not sure if it's the write speed or whether my USB hub doesn't have enough power. My USB hub is an Anker 15 watts.

I'm thinking of getting the Anker 60 watts because I'm blasting hard drives and VM everywhere. Question is, is the crashing have to do with not enough power supplied to the hard drives or is it my hard drives too slow?

My hard drives are the seagate for 70 bucks on Amazon, the 2 TB ones. The one on top of the search listings.

MM78 · #2 07-26-2017

How much Ram do you in general on your computer? How much ram are you giving to each VMWare?

empirestate · #3 07-26-2017

RAM is a big issue with VMs I agree. Have at least 16gb minimum if you want to run 5-10 VMs at once.

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glacier922 · #4 07-26-2017

I have a hard time with just one VM, I give 1 gb on a perfectly functional VM tho. Getting the second one running, that's a problem.

empirestate · #5 07-26-2017

It could be a driver issue since you are using a Mac. Buy a Windows machine, Macs are retarded...

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Play · #6 07-26-2017

hmm... let me get this right.

You have Macbook. You have an external hard drive. Your VMs are on the external hard drive. Your connecting the Macbook to the external hard drive using USB?

If so - that would be a big issue, depending on which USB version your using. The read/write speeds just wont suffice.

Also what OS are you using? 1GB RAM on WinXP is fine, but Win10 for example wont suffice.

--

Anyway, if your using VM's, you need to take into account they are resource hungry, so you need to have a lot of it at your disposal.

I highly recommend you to consider purchasing a custom made computer. Their cost effective, and you wont have these snags to deal with.
Ideally you want to run VMs off of SSDs connected to internal SATA cables, directly off the motherboard for the optimum speeds.

glacier922 · #7 07-26-2017

^^^^

Pretty much correct, except the hard drives are external hard drives. This is the one I got:
Seagate Expansion 2TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEA2000400)

Not sure if it's 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm.

I'm running Windows 7. I wouldn't know why a Mac would make any difference.

Play · #8 07-26-2017

Quote:

Originally Posted by glacier922

^^^^

Pretty much correct, except the hard drives are external hard drives. This is the one I got:
Seagate Expansion 2TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEA2000400)

Not sure if it's 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm.

I'm running Windows 7. I wouldn't know why a Mac would make any difference.

That's what I mentioned in the previous post - external hard drives.

Are you connecting it via USB cable? As mentioned that wont suffice.

You need to either a) be using the internal hard drive of your Macbook, or b) get another computer that has sufficient storage so you can run VMs directly from internal hard drive.

Using external hard drives is just not the way to go with Virtual Machines. As mentioned earlier, they are resource intensive so everything needs to be tip top.

All the best

glacier922 · #9 07-26-2017

^^^^

Aren't these external hard drives capable of running operating systems in the first place? Some of them are from old laptop computers. Do you mean SSD external hdd would be better? Or do you mean just the fact it is USB, that it cannot run? The USB is 3.1 and the hub is externally powered. So far, I'm running 2 VM with 2 hdd, it's running ok so far, with the same usb port. I mean it is 10 gbps, I'm thinking, that is pretty fast.

muzzie · #10 07-27-2017

1) USB drives are quite slow for VMs, use local drive
2) RAM is a huge question. For example, if you run Win 7 VM, it requires 2 GB of ram to go smoothly, if it has less - it also goes fine, but when you open something that tends to memleak, like a Firefox, it can easily eat up all your ram, start swapping and die, as VM harddrive is not so fast as real one. So. Make sure your PC has enough RAM to cover all VMs with their recommended RAM size, PLUS recommended RAM for your host computer x 2. So if you run 4 x Win 7 VMs, and run several apps in the host computer, it is recommended to have 16 Gigs of RAM.

glacier922 · #11 07-27-2017

Ok, I have figured it out, it's not my hub has no power, it's not whether my hard drive is too slow, it's just that each hard drive can run one VM. These are full hard drives, not USB thumb drives.

I just picked up one of my old laptop hard drives, not even SATA, it's PATA/IDE, plugged in a IDE to USB adapter, plugged it into my USB hub, copied a VM file on to it, running 2 VMs now without any problems. I'm thinking I'd be running at most 3 VMs at a time, so I'm going to need 3 hard drives, so looks like I need to get another one of those IDE to USB adapters. It's so rare now!

BiN4RY · #12 07-27-2017

IDE is a very slow and obsolete bus for storage, you should not consider this as your solution in 2017. Most hard drives today can transfer faster than the bus supports.

Also, "it's just that each hard drive can run one VM" is definitely not the root of your problem. If your drive seizes up or disconnects when it's experiencing high usage, something IS bottle-necking it (most likely power).

glacier922 · #13 07-27-2017

^^^^

So you're saying that my 15 watt USB hub is not providing enough power?

phaz0rz · #14 07-27-2017

USB 3.0 moves data at 5Gbps (3.1 is 10Gbps) while SATA 3 at the most does 6Gbps, so I doubt that's the bottleneck here. Dumb question, but are your USB ports at least 3.0? I know you mentioned your hub and external hard drive but not your computer ports.

Google says a standard 3.5" spinny drive uses 9W at the most so I don't think your hub is the problem unless the manufacturer lied about the output. Could be 15W is it's peak output while constant output is more like 10W..

Quote:

it's just that each hard drive can run one VM

I know that's not the case because I used to run 3-4 at a time with my internal HDD before I upgraded to an SSD. For what it's worth a flash drive would be better for running VM's compared to an external disk drive, because a flash drive is solid-state storage and is much faster.

Just spitballing - I don't know what's wrong.

glacier922 · #15 07-27-2017

Wait so they got flash drives that are ssd now? And u can run multiple VM without a hitch? I'm looking to run 3 max 4 VM at a time, will that one ssd flash do it?

phaz0rz · #16 07-27-2017

All flash drives are solid state - that's just the nature of flash media.

HDD = Disk drive, SSD = Solid state drive

A SSD is basically just a large flash drive with a SATA connection rather than USB.

I can't make any guarantees about smooth operation but I can say you would have better results with a flash drive compared to an external disk drive, because the read/write speed is much faster with any type of solid state memory.

glacier922 · #17 07-27-2017

I didn't even know that flash drives are ssd now to be honest. Wonder if a 512 gb external hard drive will do the trick with 4 VM running. And yea, all my cables, ports, hub everything is 3.0

BiN4RY · #18 07-27-2017

Quote:

Originally Posted by glacier922

^^^^

So you're saying that my 15 watt USB hub is not providing enough power?

Power supplies themselves can be wonky. A lot of them loses power output as they age from use. I'd try it with another power supply first.

Quote:

Originally Posted by glacier922

I didn't even know that flash drives are ssd now to be honest. Wonder if a 512 gb external hard drive will do the trick with 4 VM running. And yea, all my cables, ports, hub everything is 3.0

Make sure you go through plenty of reviews before buying one of those pocket SSDs. Some of them are horribly designed and will overheat within minutes of use.

Personally, I'd recommend the this. If you want more storage and lower price at the cost of performance, this is fine too.

Alternatively, you can also buy a real SSD and put it into an USB enclosure as well.

MM78 · #19 07-28-2017

I'm using a Seagate 1TB External Drive, I typically run 6-9 VM's ranging from Windows XP to Windows 7 Tiny.

phaz0rz · #20 07-28-2017

Quote:

Originally Posted by glacier922

I didn't even know that flash drives are ssd now to be honest. Wonder if a 512 gb external hard drive will do the trick with 4 VM running. And yea, all my cables, ports, hub everything is 3.0

Flash drives always have been and always will be solid state, lol. Computer storage is either a disk-based or solid state. A solid-state hard drive and a Flash drive both have the same type of solid state storage. I'm beating a dead horse here, but yeah, SSD's and Flash drives are the same thing. Only difference is how they connect to your computer.

I've always just backed up my VM's externally and booted them from my internal hard drive. I'm curious as to why so many of you are booting them from external media? I understand it's just as fast with USB 3.1 or eSATA but it seems like a hassle.

To answer your question though, the size of your external drive isn't going to make any difference in regards to performance. There's a bottleneck somewhere. Do you have a USB 3.0 flash drive handy? If so, put 2 or 3 of your VM's on there and try running them. That way you can easily determine if solid-state media will perform better than disk-based media for running your VM's.

glacier922 · #21 07-28-2017

Quote:

Originally Posted by MM78

I'm using a Seagate 1TB External Drive, I typically run 6-9 VM's ranging from Windows XP to Windows 7 Tiny.

Are you using a Mac or PC? desktop or laptop? How much ram are you using for the Windows 7 tiny? Can I get a copy? LOL.

empirestate · #22 07-28-2017

Quote:

Originally Posted by glacier922

Are you using a Mac or PC? desktop or laptop? How much ram are you using for the Windows 7 tiny? Can I get a copy? LOL.

You should make your own lite version. https://www.ntlite.com/shop/

http://www.intowindows.com/5-free-to...llation-setup/
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