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I use a number of different OS images with VM Fusion on my Mac. Some are for malware analysis, and some I actually use to develop software using Visual Studio. I also like to play with older, or rare OS'es. I only have 250GB SSD on my MacBook so all these images take up space. Oftentimes I get warnings that my diskspace is low when I use the a VM.

Is it possible to use my 1TB USB HDD to host the images and run them from there without many speed issues? I don't do anything intensive on any of the VMs. The HDD is not an SSD.

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  • I think you can at least store therm on there but, don't forget, a performance hit will be immediately present because of the speed of USB (or you could use FireWire!). Also, much of the operation will be carried out to RAM so, if you've got enough, it should work quite nicely. I don't use Mac and I use VirtualBox which allows images (vhd) to be loaded from other drives...
    – Kinnectus
    May 25, 2014 at 22:19

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You might notice a small hit but this also depends on the amount of RAM in your system. I've been running my virtual machines (typially 8-16 GB virtual HDDs) off an external USB2 HDD (2.5") without any issues. I didn't notice any significant performance issues so far.

I've been using VirtualBox though, so your experience with VMWare might be slightly different.

Is there anything keeping you from doing trial and error and just set up one virtual machine and test performance?

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