Hyper-V IDE or SCSI? What’s Performing Better, Faster?

If you wonder whether to use IDE or SCSI controllers for your Hyper-V virtual machines, the short answer is: IDE is fine.

There is no need to go for SCSI, it won’t be any faster. Note that you need to have a IDE connected virtual disk in order to boot.

If you want better performance, the virtual machines will run much faster if you:

1. Use pass through disks instead
2. Use fixed sized VHDs
3. Refrain from using snapshots / checkpoints
4. Refrain from using dynamically expanding disks
5. Have at least 15% free space inside the VM at all times, and at least 10GB free. It’s an old characteristic of NTFS….
6. Use paging files on a separate VHD, ideally hosted on a separate drive
7. Use fixed-sized paging files
8. Use 4KB NTFS cluster size on the host

In addition, you would want to use the VHDX format instead because it provides faster access to the disk due to its block size on newer hard drives.

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