Fellow RD and colleague Ken Spencer posted a little while back that he was having good success loading VPC images off flash drives. I thought it was time to try it myself.
The first concept is that not all flash drives are created equal. I went and found fast ones. I ended up with Corsair Flash Voyager GT drives in 16G, which was just big enough to hold the VPC images I was working with. These are extra fast drives that have matched controllers and memory and are rated up to 34 MB/sec. In Australia, they are $119 AUD but I've seen them on US sites for about $63 USD recently.
Next concept is that I needed to reformat the drives as the VPC images were too large for the default FAT32 formatting. As I bought two drives, I tried one with NTFS and a cluster size of 4k and the other also NTFS but with 64k.
The last concept is that these drives are fast for reading but not writing. Virtual PC 2007 seems to insist that the undo disk is in the same folder as the vmc file so I placed the vmc file on my internal eSata 7200rpm 200G drive. That meant the undo disk was there too.
What can I say? The results show it's worth doing.
| Operation | Internal Drive | 4k Cluster | 64k Cluster |
| Boot To Login | 1:27 | 0:51 | 0:50 |
| Desktop Appears | 2:09 | 1:07 | 1:06 |
| SSMS Usable | 3:09 | 1:30 | 1:28 |
I haven't done extensive testing of it in use yet but booting twice as fast has to be a good thing 🙂 The cluster size made only the very slightest difference.