Poor SSD Performance in Windows 10 VM


Marc_G2

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I noticed I was getting poor SSD (Crucial MX300) write performance (about 100 MB/s or less) in my Windows 10 VM. The SSD was mounted using Unassigned Devices. I noticed Windows referred to the VirtIO drive as a SCSI device. So I tried changing "Primary vDisk Bus" to SATA to see if it would help.   That didn't help, and it ended up causing other issues including stuttering/cracking audio.  The MSI fix doesn't seem to work.  Switching back to VirtIO doesn't allow Windows to boot.

 

What performance should I expect from my SSD?  Was my problem a VirtIO configuration issue?

 

EDIT.

Will try a fresh install and passing though the SSD.

 

Edited by Marc_G2
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Well I managed to get VM booting with VirtIO again.  I needed to initialize my newly created disk in Windows Disk Management prior to switching the primary disk to use VirtIO.

 

A quick file copy test shows sustained writes are still less than 100 MB/s.   For some reason, Windows won't let me defragment the SSD.  It says "Optimization not available" on its status.  I'm pretty sure the XML is correct:

 

<disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback' discard='unmap'/>
      <source file='/mnt/disks/Crucial_CT525MX300SSD1_163213963944/Windows 10/vdisk1.img'/>
      <backingStore/>
      <target dev='hdc' bus='virtio'/>
      <boot order='1'/>
      <alias name='virtio-disk2'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/>

 

Edited by Marc_G2
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I created a new VM while passing though the SSD.  Sustained write speed is now 200+ MB/s.  Definitely better, but still not close to bare metal.  Crystal diskmark gave bad results due to caching.  For perspective, this is what Space Invader One got for a Vdisk.  He had similarly bad sequential write speeds.

 

https://youtu.be/QaB9HhpbDAI?t=15m44s

 

Should I still configure the disk to as a "thin provisioned drive"? 

 

 

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