VMWare I/O - Need some [H]elp

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Pumpkin Ghost
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Apr 24, 2005
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So currently I am trying to figure out where to take my sig rig. The trick here is I want it to be my work horse as well as my gaming rig. I do a LOT of work with VM's in VMWare. Building test labs mostly. So right now I have a single SSD as my boot with OS, drivers, and needed programs. I also have a 1TB WD Black drive for everything else. My movies, Steam, other games, and my VM's. Both drives are on the Intel 6Gb/s ports.

So the issue I am running into now is that when I'm watching a movie, running two or more VM's, and trying to play a game (or do something else) my HDD become audible over my case fans and of course the VM's slow down when more than two are powered on. Since I don't use the Intel 3G ports and they are all free save for one (DVD drive) I was going to get some HDD's and put them on those ports (I need to check if they support Raid-5) to help out with the heavy I/O. So my question is what drives would you recommend for a setup like this? I'm looking for higher capacity drives as well. I need speed, capacity and reliability.
 
You can put any HDD or SSD on the rest of the intel ports, and migrate VM's, data, or programs over to them.

It sounds like to me you're running out ouf IOPS on your 1tb disk, so spreading out the work over other disks would remedy this issue. There will be very little real-life noticible difference for any device between SATAII and SATA III ports.

I would advise against RAID5. Do single disk or RAID0 and backups instead.
 
The only reason I was thinking Raid 5 was for redundancy. I was thinking of either Seagate or WD Reds for a raid config. I'll shop around as see what I find. Thanks.
 
Full backups would serve you better than the "Redundancy" that raid5 provides. RAID5 also takes a pretty big hit on certain types of IO.
 
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