While waiting for Parallels to complete its monthly maintenance, I started Task Manager in Windows 11 to get an idea of what was going on. I noticed that the Windows disk defragmenter was running. Since my Mac just has SSDs attached to it, this seemed like a pretty bad idea. From Crucial, a well known manufacturer of SSDs: https://www.crucial.com/articles/about-ssd/should-you-defrag-an-ssd TL;DR Defragging an SSD is not only a waste of time, it can actually harm the SSD over time by using up the finite write cycles of the drive. While defragmenting a hard drive is usually a great idea, the same principle definitely does NOT apply to SSDs. Now I'm not totally sure this same logic applies to a virtual machine, but it does seem clear that all the extra write I/O would still stress the underlying hardware. Any thoughts?