Poor SATA driver performance with Linux Host, Windows Guest.

[bifferos]

Host: Linux
Guest: Windows XP
CPU: Single-core

I've done some fairly extensive testing, and it appears there is no performance advantage from using an emulated SATA controller over an IDE one, when using the above configuration.

The reason for the existence of the SATA controller emulation is (I assume) to have a high-performance storage option rather than for compatibility reasons, so I assume it's intended there should be a performance improvement when switching to emulated SATA.

[Frank Mehnert]

The performance of the SATA emulation is mostly limited by the performance of the host hard disk. The reason for implementing a SATA controller are

• up to 31 devices (IDE provides only 4 devices)
• only one IRQ is needed for up to 31 devices (needs two IRQs for only four devices)

[bifferos]

Thanks for the clarification. So long as this is expected, it may as well be closed I guess, however it is very odd that this only seems to affect Linux hosts.

Please see this thread for more details: ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=8119 Particularly the post Aug 12, 2008 2:35 pm, from TerryE.

If the ticket is kept, perhaps the title should be changed to "Poor disk performance with Linux Host".

[Frank Mehnert]

I will close this ticket as the SATA performance should have been increased with the latest release. If you still experience notable differences between SATA and IDE, reopen this ticket. Make sure that you test VirtualBox 2.2.2.