Share External Storage Devices and Volumes

When you connect an external storage device, such as a USB drive, to the host computer, you can access the contents from the host OS applications.

Using SmartMount, you can set Parallels Workstation to automatically mount storage devices and volumes to your virtual machine. That way, you can access the contents from both the host and guest OSs.

With SmartMount enabled, these items are automatically mounted to the virtual machine:

• Removable drives : External storage devices, such as USB hard disks and USB flash drives.
• CD/DVD drives : CD and DVD drives or CD/DVD images (files most commonly ending in .iso .).
• Network folders : Folders shared over the network.

To enable SmartMount:

1. Start Parallels Workstation.
2. In the sidebar , select the virtual machine for which you want to enable SmartMount and click Virtual Machine > Configure > Options > Sharing .
3. In the Sharing pane, select Map host volumes to virtual machine and click OK .

When you connect a storage device or volume, it is mounted as a network drive. For example, a USB flash drive plugged in to the host computer will be also accessible from the virtual machine.

Note: Permissions for accessing the mounted device from the virtual machine are the same as permission settings for the device in the host OS. For example, if you can read from and write to a USB flash drive in the host OS, you can also read from and right to it in the guest OS.