During my preparations for the the MSDN Webcast I'm presenting tomorrow I realized the eSATA
drive I purchased was not performing as fast as I thought it would. I decided to see exactly how
fast my external hard drive runs a virtual machine when it is connected via USB 2.0 vs. the eSATA
interface. I also threw in a test to see how the virtual machine runs on the host machine's C:\. It's
been a couple of years since I benchmarked a SharePoint virtual machine, so I thought I would
share the results with everyone. Hyper-V is the virtual technology I used to run the virtual machine
in this series of tests.
Host Machine:
Dell Precision M6300 Laptop
Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5Ghz
8GB RAM
Operating System: Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64
External Hard Drive:
Seagate 2.5" SATA II Hard Disk – 7200RPM 8MB Cache
INEO 2.5" External Hard Drive Case (Supports USB 2.0 and eSATA) - $29.95
eSATA Express Card 54 - $29.95
Virtual Machine:
Windows 2003 Server R2 – Standard Edition
Domain Controller
Application Server
SQL Server 2005 – Standard Edition
MOSS 2007 Enterprise
VS.NET 2008
SharePoint Designer
Office 2007
Memory allocated to virtual machine: 2548MB
Test results in mm:ss format:
| Test | USB 2.0 | eSATA | C:\ |
| Boot the virtual machine. Test complete when the press ctrl-alt-delete screen appears. | 01:26.1 | 03:00.0 | 01.27.5 |
| Load the SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration web site from the Start Menu for the first time. | 01:06.1 | 01:03.1 | 00:44.8 |
| Load the home page of the Adventure Works Travel Site in another instance of IE for the first time. | 01:07.9 | 01:02.1 | 01:03.0 |
| Open Windows Explorer for the first time. | 00:04.0 | 00:02.1 | 00:02.5 |
| Open VS 2008 for the first time. | 00:05.3 | 00:05.3 | 00:04.0 |
| Shut down the virtual machine. | 00:51.3 | 00:51.5 | 00:50.1 |
| Totals | 04:40.2 | 06:04.1 | 04:11.9 |
* The tasks were performed in identical and sequential order for both the USB 2.0 and
eSATA interfaces.
* I should note that while these tests were run I had the following applications open on the
host machine.
- 3 Instances of Internet Explorer
- Microsoft Outlook
- Microsoft Office Communicator
- Windows Live Messenger
- Hyper-V Manager
- Windows Explorer
The results are quite interesting. A few years ago virtual machines running on external hard drives
ALWAYS out-performed virtual machines running on my laptop's C:\. However, as these tests
indicate, with the technology advancements in laptop processors, memory, motherboards and
hard disks an external hard disk no longer provides a significant performance gain, if any.
It's also important to note that although the eSATA interface does not offer a significant
performance boost for virtual machines, it does offer a significant performance boost associated with
copying large files (such as virtual hard disks) and performing system backups. I was able to use
the built in Windows Server Backup to back up my C:\ (74.8GB of data) in less than 20 minutes.
The same backup operation took over an hour with USB 2.0.
What about you? Have you seen the same behavior in your experiences?