I have a new HP DL120 G7 server with ESXi5. One VM is a Win2003 instalation and I have an external USB2.0 drive attached by USB Controller and USB Device.

I copy a 4GB file from external USB to server disk.

In the VM that takes up to 10 minutes.

On a native Win2003 that takes aprox. 3 minutes.

I have no explaination for that diference:

• In any case the bottleneck is the USB connection, much slower than the disks (SAS, RAID1).
• If the USB connection on the VM would be USB1.1 and not USB2.0 it would take much more time.
• (The disk performance between server partitions on the VM is correct. -> see update)
• Could be that my native box is extremely fast and the VM is the normal case.
• ???

Update

I try with passtrough and a first run copy the same data in aprox. 7 minutes. Still 2 times slower than the native connection.

I also did another messure and the copy between partitions on the same VM takes 3 minutes.