This post is part of a series to assist new users ofParallels Desktop.
The virtual machine can then run alongside your normal Mac apps, such as Apple Mail and Safari, allowing you to run Windows and Mac apps on the Mac desktop at the same time. Virtual Drive For Windows 10 free download - PDF Reader for Windows 10, Facebook for Windows 10, Bluetooth for Windows 10, and many more programs. VirtualBox is a free virtualization program that allows you to run any OS on your computer by downloading a virtual machine. Try MacOS on your Windows PC, or install Windows apps on your Mac PC. Disk Utility is free and included with every copy of the Mac OS. And while the various cloning apps have a lot more features, if you don't have access to third-party apps, using Disk Utility will create a perfectly usable clone, although it may require a few more steps and lacks some nice features, such as automation and scheduling. By BurningThumb Software Virtual CD RW Mac is an easy to use virtual CD drive for Mac OS X 10.6 or later. It uses a disk image, but appears to Mac OS X as if you have inserted a CD, so you can read.
Virtual machines for Parallels Desktop on your Mac can be pretty large. Even a basic install of Windows 10 with Office for Windows will take up more than 21GBs on your Mac's internal drive. Now, if you use that VM every day, that is not an unreasonable storage commitment. But what about that macOS Mojave VM that you use to keep some old 32-bit Mac apps available? While those old apps are important, you only use them a couple of times a month. Is that worth the 40GBs on your Mac's internal drive? What can you do?
Can you keep infrequently used VMs in iCloud? This is probably not a great choice for two reasons: (1) a VM stored in iCloud will run really slowly, and (2) you will have to pay Apple around $1-$3 every month for this storage.
A better solution is to store these infrequently used VMs on an external drive, and to connect the drive to your Mac whenever you want to use these VMs. In this blog post I will explain the various factors involved in running VMs on external drives so that you can make the best choice for your needs.
The factors are:
How to get your VM onto an external drive
You should create your VMs on the internal drive of the Mac, and then move them to your external drive, as creating a VM directly on the external drive will take a lot longer. Just follow these steps:
- Create the VM on the internal drive of the Mac.
- Delete the VM from the Control Center, but make sure not to move the VM to the trash. Keep the Files. (Figure 1)
Virtual Mac On Windows 10
- Move the VM to your external drive.
- Add the VM now on the external drive to the Control Center. You will see some warning alerts when you run it. (Figure 2)
Microsoft office for mac mojave free download. When you are finished, the new VM will now have a special icon badge in the Control Center indicating that it is on an external drive. (Figure 3) Mac wireless keyboard.
Will a VM on an external drive run as fast?
As long as you have a good external drive with a fast connection to your Mac, it will run as fast as it would on your internal drive. The one area where it may be slower is disk access. So, if the Windows app you are running in the VM on the externally-stored drive is performing many 'reads and writes' to the disk, then it will be probably slow.
I took some performance benchmarks of the same VM on the internal drive of my iMac, and then on two different external drives. I used UserBenchmark for these tests, and the results are shown in Table 1. The only area where there was a significant speed difference was in disk access.
User Benchmark Results for the VM stored in three different places:
What I do
My best, and thus my favorite, external drive is a 1TB SSD2GO PKT MK2. It is physically small, and really fast. I also use a 1TB Samsung Portable SSD T5, and a 1TB Western Digital My Passport™ SSD. These are all excellent external drives for Parallels Desktop users.
Parallels Desktop provides flexibility for where you store your VMs so that you can pick the one (or two or three) that most closely align with your needs.
Virtual Mac Os X
Let us know in the comments if you put some of your VMs on an external drive.
