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 November 12, 20205 yr by christopher2007
typo

does "better performance" means

- higher read/write speed?

- less CPU usage on host (UnRAID) system?

- less CPU usage on VM?

- less RAM on host/VM?

- ...

Update me on the performance wise.

I did a little testing today using ATTO Disk Benchmark. There seems to be no real difference between RAW and QCOW2.

 

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:

RAW:

Edited March 8, 20215 yr by b0n3v
Adding info - Unraid ver.6.8.3 stable