Why does my external hard disk get pinned when VMWare is opened?

[Chris Fischer]

Hello there!

I recently realized that when VMWare is opened on my device, my external hard drive gets pinned to 100%, which means making virtual machines is impossible, since the software freezes before making it. I included a screen recording, showing what happens. Is this a windows problem, or a VMWare problem? 

OS: Windows 11 24H2 (26100.6584)

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[kasper]

Confirm WIndows Host.   A Windows host may run the AV antivirus Windows defender when opening any files including vmdk.   Best guess that is the issue.   But you can run Windows task manager to pinpoint the problem.

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[Technogeezer]

@kasper has a good point to check whether AV could be the cause of this. Any AV solution (Microsoft Defender and others) running on the host  should be configured to exclude folders containing virtual machines from scans. Not only does host AV scanning of VMs impact performance of both the host and VM, but it has been shown that scans can find false positives that corrupt virtual machines. If you need AV scanning for the VM, run it in the VM. 

You performance graphs show high busy statistics, but very low transfer rates. Something else may be amiss here. What is this external USB disk (yes, I see it says LaCie USB3 SCSI, but can you tell us a bit more about it) and what file system is it formatted with? Hopefully it's formatted with NTFS and not FAT32 or ExFAT. 

Have you run any performance tests outside of VMware Workstation or examined SMART data for that drive to rule out any kind of hardware issue?

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Technogeezer]

Also, is this external drive highly fragmented? 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[RaSystemlord]

You already got good answers to your problem. My text below is probably just an extension to your (or somebody else's similar) problem.

If your external drive is a HDD or using USB 2.0 interface, the suggestion is simple: DON'T!.

HDD versus SSD gives an awful performance. It is much slower than what the numbers suggest. Any SSD gives a decent performance - you don't necessarily need modern technology SSD's, like: M.2 nVME PCI-e 4.0/5.0 SSD's with really high read/write speeds.

The fragmentation discussion is about HDD's, not SSD's where it doesn't have relevance.

USB 2.0 is also in the category of DON'T. It is just awful compared to USB 3.0 or USB 3.2 Gen 2 as the latest. Well, whatever your disk or disk enclosure is, what is your cable? Are you sure it is decent - it makes a world of difference on what the cable is? You don't necessarily see the difference, for instance USB-C cable can be good or really bad - unfortunately there are not always markings on the cable to know what they are. I have personally standardised to use ASUS (TUF gaming or ROG Strix) enclosures to make sure that the performance is good with provided ASUS cables or some carefully selected cables from a Net shop.

[Chris Fischer]

Ok, making a giant reply.

I used cystaldiskinfo + crystaldiskmark to get information

The cable is the cable the drive came with (usb-c to micro-usb super speed)

It is a spinning hard disk, so that might be the problem.

Here's what windows shows under properties.

Attempting to run chkdsk, and will defragment, but if anyone wants more info, please let me know.

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[RaSystemlord]

The problem is the spinning disk. Those measurements are misleading - it is much slower in VMware compared to what you see. Just move to SSD technology.

The cable is probably OK if it came with the disk. Based on your description, it seems that the PC connection is also OK.

As for fragmentation - it is a hassle. I would defrag it in Windows, but then you need to defrag in VMware - there is a menu for that. If the disk is fragmented, the performance will suffer or greatly suffer. You need to keep on defragmenting - the technology is inferior compared to SSD.

[kasper]

You can also go to device manager / disk drivers and right click on the drive.   Select properties / policy and then select write cache enabled if it is not already.

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[richard612]

Repeating that VM creation process with Resource Monitor open could be interesting.  It'd help zero-in on what's being accessed and which process is responsible.

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[RaSystemlord]

Just to clarify: I have not commented on that 100% thingy - you got answers to that already. It is probably that anti-virus thingy, whatever software you have running there, trying to deal with vmware-specific files, a big mistake.

You have all kinds of setups in Windows which will make the performance suffer - depends on what you have configured and what you have installed or failed to uninstall or the uninstall itself fails. It's really hard to judge based on screenshots - you would need to study the system as a whole. For instance: you have encryption on or off, you have possible errors (like on hardware level) on your disk, some extra software that you have uninstalled but which is still running ... just a few things on top of things that have already been mentioned. And those you have both on the Host or VM.