>>>(3) Don't store the data you access a lot ( dbf's and the like) on a network drive - aka as shared folders - very slow
>>>(4) Instead use VMware hard discs ( config)
>>
>>For some files (my 200000 photos, that is) I do use a shared drive (linux host system, ntfs partition - i.e. my old Q: drive which survived everything - and it's too big to move anywhere). It is a tad slow, but for one file at a time, or maybe a dozen, that's good enough. I consider that network traffic, and it does go at the speed of the network, not on the same machine (even though physically it is).
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>I use Robocopy to backup/sync. It copies only files that have been modified
>What I was saying is that copying a vm disk of several gigabytes is a lot faster than copying a lot of small files

For copying I don't really care - the amounts I have are beyond my patience anyway, so if there's something big to copy, I simply leave it to be done when I'm AFK. The case I have is that I have a little app that builds webpages and shows them in a browser object, and some of those pages may contain photos from that 'network' disk. That does not feel snappy at all, still below 400ms or thereabouts, but not instantaneous. I remember it used to be faster when it was on the same disk.

But if that's the price of all other things that I have now, I'm happy.

Just as a curiosity: I downloaded Canon's tethering app few years ago and lost half a day until I got it to work (it won't run on 64-bit windowses, but doesn't detect them either, just doesn't work - took me a lot of googling to find out and move to one laptop where I still have 32bit W7). Then when I did get it to work, it was rather slow, the reaction time, the communication speed, the capabilities - it doesn't have a proper live preview, it takes test shots (!)... awful. I lost a whole afternoon for something I eventually found unusable. Now on Linux I saw someone wrote a tethering app and that it has good reviews. Installed it (less than a minute), plugged the camera in and guess what - full live preview, as large as I want, 64-bit, I can actually use the big screen to check focus. Three minutes between noticing it on the list and seeing it work.