Storing VirtualBox machine on SD card

[Brent212]

Does anyone have experience/advice on using an SD card to store the bulk of a virtual machine that I create with VirtualBox? I'm hoping I can just set the location for the virtual disk .vdi file to a path on the SD card, but am wondering if there will be any problems, performance or otherwise.

I know there's some recommendations on how to use SD cards to maximize their life by minimizing read or write frequency, so is there anything I should do when setting up my virtual machine in that regard? Type of storage controller, type of hard disk (I see there's a checkbox for "solid state drive" ), etc?

Thanks for any input.

 

[Ruffles]

While I haven't tried it, I believe you could just enter a path on the SD card in Virtual box. The only problem I can see is the performance of the SD card is pretty poor and I don't think a VM hosted there would work very well.

 

[hotphil]

It'll be slow.
If you can split the VM into an OS vdi and one or more data vdi's, stick the OS one on the SSD, the others on the SD and performance/usability might be bearable.
I'd not worry about trying to minimise read/writes to the SD.

 

[Frobon]

You are not going to get the speeds you need to run any VM besides light linux off an SD card. For a class 10 SDXC card, you will only get about 10-30 Mbps, not enough for smooth operation other than simple transfer of data.

Your best bet will be to simply run the VM off a USB device. USB 2.0 runs at about 480 Mbps or preferably off a USB 3.0 device which can run up to 4.8 Gbps. Running it off a USB should provide you with enough bandwidth to run lightweight VMs without much bandwidth issues.