ESXi 4.1 - SATA drive slow

[Piotr Kirklewski]

Hi there
I'm using ESXi 4.1 with just one 1TB SATA drive to play with some installations at home.
Since some time ago I noticed significant decrease in performance of my VM's. At first I thought it's a network issue but today I discovered the following:

1. Copying a file from one VM to another VM on the same drive:
100% 68MB 216.9KB/s 05:20

2. Copying the same file from a VM to my Laptop: 100% 68MB 33.9MB/s 00:02

As you see sending the same file via the network takes significantly less time than from VM to VM on the same drive.

Any ideas on what's going on ?

[BPE]

What is the HW you are using?
There are some Intel Sandy Bridge SATA controller which will lose performance over time but I never heard or saw that HP is using this technology inside there severs. If you are using such HW, I would recommend to check the chip which is used for the disk controller. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2379241,00.asp