Price may be the factor that overrides the others. This may be a significant factor if you use a Mac Book Pro – the most common Mac model for users of Parallels Desktop – and if you move around a lot. 250GB or 500GB should be fine for most users. 1TB will be great, but may be an overkill if you only have one VM to move to an external drive. The higher capacity drives are often the best. In my experience, a USB-C, USB 3.0 connection, or a Thunderbolt connection is best. You want the fastest possible connection. 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. Is that worth the 40GBs on your Mac’s internal drive? What can you do?Ĭan 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.Ī 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. 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. Now, if you use that VM every day, that is not an unreasonable storage commitment. Even a basic install of Windows 10 with Office for Windows will take up more than 21GBs on your Mac’s internal drive. Virtual machines for Parallels Desktop on your Mac can be pretty large. T his post is part of a series to assist new users of Parallels Desktop.

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