Solid-State Drives

If your host machine has a physical solid-state drive (SSD), the host informs guest operating systems they are running on an SSD.

This allows the guest operating systems to optimize behavior. How the virtual machines recognize SSD and use this information depends on the guest operating system and the disk type of the virtual disk (SCSI, SATA, IDE, or NVMe).

• On Windows 8, Windows 10, Ubuntu, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines, all drive types can report their virtual disks as SSD drives.

  Note:

  • NVMe virtual hard disks are natively supported for Windows 8.1 and later.

  • To create a new a virtual machine with a Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 guest operating system using NVMe as the virtual hard disk, apply the appropriate Windows hot fix. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2990941.

  • Several Linux operating systems support NVMe while others do not. Check with the operating system vendor.

• On Windows 7 virtual machines, only IDE and SATA virtual disks can report their virtual disks as SSD. SCSI virtual disks only report as SSD when used as a system drive in a virtual machine, or as a mechanical drive when used as a data drive inside a virtual machine.

• On Mac virtual machines, only SATA and NVMe virtual disks are reported as SSD. IDE and SCSI virtual disks are reported as mechanical drives.

  Note:

  NVMe virtual hard disks are supported for macOS 10.13 and later.

Use the virtual machine operating system to verify your virtual machine is using SSD as its virtual disk.