On Friday, Scott Hanselman posted a list of tips on optimizing Virtual PC performance that originally came from J. Sawyer at Microsoft, and the main take away I got from it was that I should be running my VPC Hard Disks on a separate physical drive from the OS and that the high the Firewire and USB 2.0 drives with high spin rates are what you are looking for. Now, I have a 6GB and a 20GB Archos USB drives that I use for my MP3s and for other data files, but their benefits are portability and not speed (I like them better than iPods, but hey that is me). Seeing that I don’t have USB 2.0 on any of my machines, but I do have Firewire on my main laptop (Dell 8500) and my Dell workstation (thanks to Firewire on the sound card), I knew that I wanted a Firewire drive. So I looked around and compared prices and options over the internet, and found a sweetheart of a deal for the new Seagate 160GB Firewire/USB 2.0 drive at CompUSA for $219 (plus a $50 rebate). That’s $169 for 160GB Firewire drive running at 7200 RPM and an 8MB cache buffer. I couldn’t pass that up, so I ran out and bought it. What I didn’t know at the time (but do now), is that it only comes with 6-pin Firewire connectors and that most laptops have 4-pin Firewire connectors. Oh well, you live and learn, so I was just about to run back to CompUSA to buy a Firewire cable with a 4-pin on one end and a 6-pin on the other, when I noticed that CompUSA doesn’t carry them instore, ther were internet orders only. Sux. So I let my fingers do the waling over to RadioShack, and sure enough, they carry them instore, but as usual, RadioShack makes you pay dearly for keeping them in stock, RadioShack’s price: $32, CompUSA’s price: $6.43 (ouch).
So what did I do with all this disk space? I copied all my mp3s off my laptop, and then my Longhorn VHD, then realized that the drive was formatted as FAT32, so I reformatted it as NTFS (which took no time at all thanks to the Seagate utility), and then recopied the files back over to the drive. The next steps is to create a Win2K3 server virtual machine to test Yukon (since I don’t want it on my main machine, and it isn’t guaranteed to work on Longhorn), and to all create a Linux virtual machine (it is about time to bite the bullet and learn more about Linux).