Anxiously Awaiting On Everything Eternal…

What’s that little slot for?

Do you own a Mac? Do you develop for Windows? If so then you're in the same bucket that I am. I worked for the evil empire for two years of my life, and ever since I have been completely hooked on their development stack. The beauty of C# easily surpasses any statically typed language I have ever worked with, but I digress. This is not a post on C#, but a post on a little gadget I found that can make VMWare work "more better" so you can stay within the UI bliss of OSX but still work the evil empire day job effectively.

Those of you with MacBook Pros, look on the left side of the laptop. What do you see? Well, probably a single USB port (thanks Steve...), a mag-charger port, and some weird flap thing. Most people have no idea what the slot behind that flap is for--and I venture a guess that it sits vacant on 99% of the MacBooks in existence. Well, it shouldn't anymore. Why? Because of this.

That little guy sits flush in the PCMCIA slot on the left hand side of your mac resulting in an instant (as in instant gratification) 48GB boost to your lappys hard disk space--and it's an SSD to boot. The PCMCIA interface is not quite as fast as a SATA 2/3 solid state disk, but still faster than a traditional 7200 RPM hard drive connected via FireWire*.

You can use this extension of space for anything really--I was using it as an onboard TimeMachine drive until inspiration struck me today. There are even reports of people installing OSX on it, which has a wicked cool factor when you pop the card into someone else's MacBook and happily boot your instance of Lion/Leopard to continue with whatever you were working on.

So how can we use this little guy to make VMWare faster? Well after googling around a bit, I found that one of the major recommendations to make VMWare faster is to boot it from an external drive (duh). It's funny that I didn't think of this immediately because I used to do this all the time with my old XP machines--I guess the utility of always having a Windows VM on-board the laptop precluded installing it on an external drive; there's less things to carry around that way. However, thanks to this tiny $128 wonder, I can now place all my virtual machines on a different drive and reap the marginal performance boost of freeing up the system drive to handle OSX functions while controller on the card handles VM read/writes. As an additional bonus my MacBook sports a smaller 128 GB SSD and placing my vm's on the card offloads the tremendous storage hit from housing a full blown Windows 7 virtual machine to the tune of around 32 GB on the system drive.

After moving the VM to the external drive I have noticed some real performance gains. Nothing super, but OSX is certainly snappier than it was before while running the VM. Also, take into account that my MacBook is almost 4 years old and it still sports a 2.2ghz barely dual-core intel CPU. I imagine newer hardware will realize even more gains. So tweakers and VMWare users looking for a snappier VM: definitely invest in one of these. After all, unless you have a 3G netcard you probably aren't using that slot anyway.

Before/After pictures:

* I realize theoretically this is not true, but empirically it is. My personal benchmarks have shown that the FileMate outruns my 1TB WDD Caviar Black in an OWC Mercury Quad interface enclosure by around 20%.