Access to 'real' disks

I don't know if this should be on the wish list or the how-to list.

Is it possible to access a non-virtual 'real' hard drive from within WinXPro running in Parallels.

 

The wish list is a good place for it, since it can't be done today.

The how to forum would be a bad place because it's a place for solutions, not problems.

 

With all due respect to a senior member, that ain't necessarily so.

You can mount any disk that can be recognized by OSX as a shared folder or a network drive, and access it just fine.

 

The guest can access any file that the host can access, but direct access to a real disk is not possible. If it were, the guest Windows could access an external NTFS partition, which is not possible today, but has been promised.

Since it's been asked for many times, and hasn't been provided, I'm guessing it's non-trivial to implement.

 

Technically, this is undoubtedly right--the guest OS does not have low-level access to the drive, but only through the host OS. And if one were wanting to do disk-intensive storage at the highest transfer rates (as for video or sound editing), or to boot from a "real disk," that would certainly be desirable, or in the latter case, necessary.

But for everyday storage purposes, either the "shared folder" or 'network drive" approach works very well, at least for me. I have not measured the transfer rates on NTFS disks through the SATA controler on my MacPro, but subjectively, they seem quite adequate. And if the disk is not connected directly to the SATA bus but instead by firewire or USB, the bottleneck most likely would be imposed by the interface, not by the host OS.

That said, I"m certainly not arguing against direct disk access--au contraire! Bring it on, I say. I'm just suggesting a potentially viable workaround for some users.

 

The problem is that without direct disk access from the guest, if you have an external NTFS disk, you can't write to it because OSX can't write to it. Direct disk access gives access to disks the guest understands but the host doesn't.

 

Point taken. I hadn't tried the experiment with NTFS disks, and hadn't noted the incompatibilty elsewhere on the net. There is talk of a utility that would let OSX speak NTFS, but I haven't been able to track it down. In my own experiments, I reflexively used FAT32 because I wasn't looking for speed, and unconsciously assumed it would be more compatibile with OSX. Partition Magic can interconvert between FAT32 and NTFS rather easily (though it would presumably do so only on a "real" PC.)

So, given this, it would appear that the primary advantage of direct disk support would be greater speed?

 

I haven't tried it, but I would expect that if partition magic will convert between formats on a PC, it would do the same on a virtual disk. It can't convert a physical disk on a VM, but only because the VM can't access a physical disk.

OSX will read but not write NTFS.

 

Quite right. I was supposing that the problem was to make use of an external disk by converting it from NTFS to FAT32.