Support for Virtual and Real Disks

This section lists the types of disks that can be used by Parallels virtual machines and provides the information about basic operations you can perform on these disks.

Supported Types of Hard Disks

Parallels virtual machines use virtual hard disks as their hard disks.

Virtual Hard Disks

The capacity of a virtual hard disk can be set from 100 MB to 2 TB.

Virtual hard disks can be of either plain or expanding format.

plain

A plain virtual hard disk image file has a fixed size. The size is determined when the disk is created.

expanding

An expanding virtual hard disk image file is small initially. Its size grows as you add applications and data to the virtual hard disk in the guest OS.

When you create a virtual machine, the disk is created in the expanding format. You can change the disk format in the Hard Disk pane of the Virtual Machine Configuration dialog. To add a plain hard disk to your virtual machine, clear the Expanding disk option when adding a hard disk to the virtual machine.

Split disks

A virtual disk of either format can be a single-piece disk or a split disk. A split disk is cut into 2 GB pieces and is stored as a single .hdd file.

CD/DVD Discs and Their Images

Parallels Desktop can access real CD/DVD discs and images of CD/DVD discs.

Parallels Desktop has no limitations on using multi-session CD/DVD discs. A virtual machine can play back audio CDs without any limitations on copy-protected discs.

If your host computer has a recordable optical drive, you can use it to burn CD or DVD discs in a virtual machine.

Parallels Desktop supports CD/DVD disc images in the ISO format.

Note: DMG disk images made with macOS Disk Utility are also supported by Parallels Desktop. When creating such an image, make sure you create a read-only and uncompressed image without any encryption.

Floppy Disks and Floppy Disk Images

Parallels Desktop can use two types of floppy disks:

  • Real diskettes inserted into a real floppy disk drive that is connected to the virtual machine.
  • Floppy disk image files having the .fdd extension and connected to the virtual machine.

Parallels Desktop treats floppy disk images like real diskettes. Parallels Desktop supports floppy disk image files that have the .fdd extension and 1.44 MB size.
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