Need to upgrade hard drive to ssd.

[JYOTSANAS]

Hi,

when I run virtual image in my system and it become very slow. I am not able to study.

I have 2 hp laptop with product number LT070AV and A1U59AV with RAM 6GB and 8GB respectively.

Should I upgrade my hard drive to ssd or upgrade my RAM.

And which system I should upgrade and also exactly which ssd I should buy which will be compatible with my system. 

Thanks, 

Jyotsana

[mdklassen]

> with RAM 6GB and 8GB respectively.

Which VM Manager software are you using?

How much of the RAM is "dedicated" to your VM?

A virtual 32-bit Windows system requires 1GB RAM, and works much better with 2GB RAM.

A virtual 64-bit Windows system requires 2GB RAM, and works much better with 3GB or 4GB of RAM.

> Should I upgrade my hard drive to ssd or upgrade my RAM ?

Start the Windows "Task Manager" on your real computer.

Click on the "Performance" Tab.

Click on the "Process Monitor" button, near the bottom of the page.

You'll be able to see detailed reports on:

* which processes on your real computer are using what percentage of your CPU,

* the rate of I/O transfers (obviously, a "very-busy" disk-drive should be replaced by a SSD),

* how much of the real RAM is in use.

Make your decision to spend, based on what you see.

Any SSD will be compatible with your computer.

[JYOTSANAS · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I am using vmware workstation 12 player. 4GB has been allocated to vm.

11% cpu usage, 97% disk activity, 82% physical memory is being used.

So it means i should go for both RAM and SSD? or only SSD is fine ?

Thanks.

[mdklassen]

> 97% disk activity, 82% physical memory is being used

That is an extremely high value for Disk Activity.

Within "Process Monitor" on your "real" computer, expand the "Disk Section", and sort on the first column ("process name"), to see if one specific process is reading/writing many files, e.g., anti-virus software doing a "background-scan".

Within "Process Monitor", expand the "Disk Section", redo the sort on "bytes read" or "bytes written", to see which file(s) are the most active.

What are the measurements when you change the VM from 4GB of RAM to only 3GB of RAM?  Also, try 2GB of RAM.

I'm assuming that you're running a copy of Windows inside the VM. Correct?

What do you see when you start "Process Monitor" inside the VM? What is the "working set" of RAM?

[JYOTSANAS]

Hi,
I'm using Linux os inside vm.
I have bought 275 GB of ssd . Tomorrow going to replace it by my own.
Hopefully everything goes right.

[mdklassen]

> I'm using Linux OS inside VM.

I would reduce the VM to allocate only 2GB of RAM to it.

For example, UBUNTU 16 requires 1GB of RAM, and having 2GB makes it very happy.