You might want to skip the whole Blu-Ray generation

[f0dder]

[...] the drives are also more robust than normal HDDs).

-4wd (September 18, 2008, 03:13 AM)

Probably used to be like that, but are you sure it still applies today? Today, it seems to me to be one of those not properly qualified urban legends that's probably in part based on snobbery (not accusing you of that, but people in general).

There's certainly been feature creep from SCSI->ATAPI (things like command queueing), and from SATA->SCSI (SAS), etc.

I wonder if there's really any quantifiable data available on SCSI vs. modern {S,P}ATA drives? Objective data, that is. Obviously that highest-performing 15k-rpm drives are SAS and not ATA, but we were talking reliability...

[Carol Haynes]

I would think that a few VMWare/VirtualPC/VirtualBox OS images on a HDD would be a more space efficient method rather than cluttering up your place with lot's of archaic hardware, (what am I saying ).

-4wd (September 17, 2008, 07:18 PM)

Assuming that Virtual Disc formats don't change and the software indefinitely supports old operating systems! What is going to happen when new versions of Windows/Linux etc. drop support for PATA and ATAPI devices - will VMWare etc. keep supporting them forever? Doubt it very much!

-Carol Haynes (September 17, 2008, 07:45 PM)

I just said on a HDD, not that it was PATA/SATA/SCSI/Fibre Channel/etc but personally I would use SCSI if it's that much of an issue, (AFAIK, all recent invocations of SCSI are still backward compatible with the original SCSI spec requiring only an adapter to connect to a current host - the drives are also more robust than normal HDDs).

And logically, if you are going to keep a HDD with Virtual systems you would install a base OS on it along with the Virtual Host software.  eg. Ubuntu with VirtualBox plus your virtual systems.
So it doesn't matter if later versions of [insert virtual host here] don't understand earlier virtual drive formats.

For that matter, just partition the HDD, install a boot manager and as many OS's as you want.  Then you can just image it from one HDD to the next when keeping up with interfaces becomes too much.

-4wd (September 18, 2008, 03:13 AM)

What I meant was that as hardware develops old versions of VMware (say) may not be usable on new operating system (it doesn't matter if it is Windows or Linux hosting - as hardware develops host OSes will develop to match the hardware - for example, it is already getting more convoluted to install Windows XP on some SATA drives). If newer OSes and hardware don't support early HDD images in VMWare and VMWare moves on to be largely compatible with the new hardware environment too then you images (even if they have a guest OS installed) may not be usable unless you have an old system to run the whole virtual show on ??

I am not talking short term here - but look at how much has changed in the last 15 years ... could you really hope to install Windows 95 on cutting edge hardware now? Already in Vista manufacturers are dropping support for hardware that was designed for XP - by the time Windows 2015 is released (probably in about 2021) none of today's hardware or operating systems will run - and most won't support the current version of VM software.

[Shades]

How do the VM companies setup their common denominator(s) for their virtual hardware and how long are these viable?

Good questions and not easy to answer. Personally I have seen a lot of companies (employing more than 5000 people) that only recently have made a switch to XP for their offices. In one extreme case I know of an IT department that is still looking for old IBM clones (with those cases made from forged iron) for use on the workfloor.

This situation not uncommon in the Netherlands, so I think it is safe to assume that this is common practice in more countries globally (the current global economic environment does not help either).

Would it not be that the common denominator the VM's support is based on the update scheme's companies use? At least it is my assumption that virtualization is most used in companies and not on personal PC's.

My guess is that it could easily be 2015 before ATA support is fased out of VM's, let alone the follow-up standards like SATA.