raw vs qcow2 (WIndows VM, UnRAID 6.9.0-beta30)


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So I read some articles and tutorials in order to create a Windows gaming VM with UnRAID. 

CPU and GPU passthrough are working great and also a UnRAID share is passed to the VM.

 

But I have a final questions that I haven't been able to find the answer to yet:

 

What is "better" for such a gaming VM? `raw` or `qcow2` as vdisc? From what I read, raw should be faster (more performance) then qcow2. In older benchmarks this is truly visible, but in newer qcow2 versions this seems to have only an impact of up to 5% or even less. And are 5% that bad in order not to have such big raw images lying around when not even half of them are really used?
So my question here: Is raw really better than qcow2 in UnRAID 6.9.0-beta30? And if so, what does "better" mean? (faster vm in general, better read/write performance and how much, ...)

 

Thanks for any help in advance.

Edited by christopher2007
typo
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  • 3 months later...

Windows 10 VM updated 02.03.21 with clean install on 01.03.21. Installed in raw, 3 test in Cristal disk mark after that convert to qcow2 and again same 3 tests. Unraid 6.8.3 stable. Results:
qcow2:

qcow2_1gb.PNG.6848f6238d3893339028d5d250ea47f4.PNG
qcow2_16gb.PNG.2b1a773dcfebdce20f382523e5c43f98.PNG
qcow2_16mb.PNG.0abae411423963c500d6f3dbd33d3bf5.PNG

RAW:
raw_1gb.PNG.f10aeaef16269be652b65d129030316b.PNG
raw_16gb.PNG.a4fbcef494da741c9cff790975d3ec68.PNG
raw_16mb.PNG.6bc90cb04acb10a835cbed81352db690.PNG

Edited by b0n3v
Adding info - Unraid ver.6.8.3 stable
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