By way of contrast, a Samsung SSD in a 2009-vintage Dell notebook earned 130.2 MB/s on that score. In Boot Camp, the SSD in that MacBook Air performs far worse than an SSD should. In a VM, the same score is 182.9 MB/s, a fourfold increase. Under Boot Camp, the 128 GB SSD delivers Random Read throughput of 49.5 MB/s. And once again you can see the effects of storage drivers. The penalty is even worse because the VM only has 1 GB of RAM available, whereas the Boot Camp installation has 4 GB to work with. On the two MacBook Airs, you can really see the hit that the Intel graphics take when they're forced to run using virtual graphics drivers. The Random Read score is 1.2 MB/s under Boot Camp but increases to 2.7 MB/s when using Parallels. Look at the difference in performance on the Mac Mini, where the WEI score goes from 5.9 to 6.9.
Surprisingly, one area of Windows performance actually improves dramatically in a virtual machine. You can look at the five numbers that make up the Windows Experience Index (WEI), but the detailed numbers are much more illuminating. To measure performance, I looked at the raw data that Windows captures when you run the Windows System Assessment tool (WinSAT.exe). What I found even more interesting was the decrease in performance that you get when you run Windows on Apple hardware. It's at least $300 if you use commercial virtualization software, and possibly much more if you need to pay for additional licenses for Windows apps. That's a bare minimum of $250 on top of the premium cost you pay for Apple's hardware. If you plan to use Boot Camp exclusively, you can skip this line item. VirtualBox is a free option, but when I looked at it a few months ago it was behind the others in terms of Windows support. I've been able to find discounts that take the cost into the sub-$60 range. Virtualization software $0-80 I've been testing VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac.You can find it discounted from legitimate resellers for roughly $250, so let's use that price. OEM copies are allowed only on new physical hardware.) At the Microsoft Store, that shrink-wrapped product costs $300. (Upgrades are only allowed if you are replacing the installed copy of OS X or a previous version of Windows installed in a VM. Windows 7 Professional $250 Under Windows license terms, the only option a normal consumer has for Windows 7 in a VM on a Mac is what's called a Full Packaged Product (FPP) license.
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