When in doubt, believe the error message and the documentation.
Connecting a USB. drive to a VM will disconnect (dismount) it from your Mac. That's a problem when you have your VM stored on that drive. Imagine what will happen if you disconnect your virtual machine's virtual disk while it's running. The VM will fail because it can no longer read or write to the virtual disk. That's why the operation isn't allowed.
If you have saved your VM on the T7 Shield SSD (that is, the .vmwarevm virtual machine bundle is stored on the external drive), you're already doing what you want. Any disk space that you use in the VM is being consumed from the T7 drive, not your Mac's internal drive. It's isolated.
You also have the ability to use space on the external SSD for other Mac applications since it is mounted to the Mac.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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Original Message:
Sent: Apr 05, 2025 05:19 PM
From: Clyde Ingram
Subject: Can a Wndows 11 64-bit ARM VM access the USB SSD that is installed in?
On a T7 Shield SSD, I have created a VMware Fusion Pro virtual machine. In this VM, I have installed Microsoft Windows 11.
From the VM menu, I open USB Settings (Windows 11 64-bit Arm: USB). From the "Connect USB devices" list, I select the checkbox beside "EFI (Samsung PSSDT7 Shield)". This generates a warning entitled:
It is not safe to connect 'EFI (Samsung PSSD T7 Shield)' to this virtual machine.
with this detail:
In general, USB mice and keyboards appear as PS/2 devices and should not be connected as USB peripherals. USB devices containing files in-use by the running virtual machine cannot be connected to the virtual machine. See the product documentation for more information.
Now, I had assumed that I could isolate my Windows VM on the T7 Shield SSD (to avoid the VM consuming space on my Macbook's internal drive), while at the same time having Windows run an application that would use free space on the SSD to store a large database (to avoid the Windows application consuming space on my Macbook's internal drive).
Was this a mistaken assumption?
Is the solution to move the Windows 11 VM from the T7 Shield SSD to the Macbook's internal storage? Will this allow the (internally-stored) Windows 11 VM to attach to the (external) SSD and use some of its space for the large database of the application that I will run under Windows? I assume that native MacBook applications will be able to use other parts of the same external SSD.
Thank-you.