Hollyman’s World blog

I received my Lexar ExpressCard 16GB SSD card last week. Unfortunately, my excitement was suppressed when I was finally able to test it with Parallels. For a refresher, my plan was to move my Windows XP parallels image off my MacBook Pro and onto the SSD card. This was to save space on my internal 80GB harddrive, which was mostly full.

Copying the 10GB image to the card was no problem and I really like how the card sits right inside my computer and doesn’t stick out like a USB flash drive.

Once I started running the parallels image, however, I realized that my goal would not be met with this device. Parallels ran OK, but running applications, menu actions, etc, were all painfully slow. I am 99% sure this is due to the nature of parallels and the speed of the card.

Parallels uses a single harddrive image file for your guest OS. In my case, that is Windows XP. This is an image of about 10GB for my use.

This design causes lots of “seeks” in the file to locate the application or whatever data it is you need to run. I’m sure that the seeking for data in the flash drive was just too slow for normal everyday use. Perhaps if my guest OS was only 2GB, it would work fine, but you will never get that with XP unless you have no applications installed…

I decided to move my parallels image back to the internal hard drive and just move things like iTunes music and some other large directories to the SSD card. This has freed up about 14GB on my internal drive, which I am more than happy with. My overall satisfaction is high, as I met my goal of getting more space on my laptop, but my desire for a faster parallels image is not going to be met with this solution.