I am currently dual-booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu using WUBI. I have understood that disk performance under Ubuntu is ‘slightly slower’ when using WUBI compared to a ‘real’ dual-boot, but exactly how big is the performance loss?
Is it worth doing a real install and spend some time to figure out how to set up a dual-boot that allows me to have a separate data partition?
My hard disk has a read speed of ~83 MB/s according to my Ubuntu LiveCD. The rest of my system is relatively fast.
Performance related to hard-disk access is also slightly slower, more so if the disk image file is fragmented, on a Wubi install compared to a normal one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(Ubuntu_installer)
The Performance Impact Of Ubuntu's Wubi Windows Installer
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_wubi_1010&num=4
Thanks for the link about performance, I'll consider it when I decide wether to do a real install or not.
Also I'll try to defrag my current WUBI install to see if it helps.