What's new
What's new

Using an external SSD drive as a virtual machine to run Cad and Cam?

g-coder05

Titanium
Joined
Mar 5, 2006
Location
Subic Bay
I managed to get out and get a new Macbook a few weeks ago after my other one finally had enough. There is not many Apple stores in this country and the online store has been out of stock from the virus lockdown. I finally settled on the only one in the store that had enough ass to do what i want. 32 gig ram, 3.8 processor, pretty much all the upgrades,,,,except some genius ordered it with only 512gb hard drive.

I think about it for a few minutes and just decided since its here I better get it and just swap the HD out when its available. Yeah, great move on my part, the new generation has all the components integrated to the system board! Swapping the drive is not an option. I now find myself with a $3k computer that by the time I install Parallels, Windows 10, NX, Featurecam, Solidworks, Delcam, and a few other of my media softwares the things gonna be full.

So it seems my only option is to connect my 2TB external SSD and use parallels to create a VM and run directly from the external. This definitely is not my ideal solution but for the time being it may have to do. My question is has anyone ran CAD/CAM from a virtual machine? This will take days to reinstall the software, reload templates, tool libraries, reconfig setting,,,,,, I don't want to risk wasting all that time if what I am attempting to do will not work.
 
I managed to get out and get a new Macbook a few weeks ago after my other one finally had enough. There is not many Apple stores in this country and the online store has been out of stock from the virus lockdown. I finally settled on the only one in the store that had enough ass to do what i want. 32 gig ram, 3.8 processor, pretty much all the upgrades,,,,except some genius ordered it with only 512gb hard drive.

I think about it for a few minutes and just decided since its here I better get it and just swap the HD out when its available. Yeah, great move on my part, the new generation has all the components integrated to the system board! Swapping the drive is not an option. I now find myself with a $3k computer that by the time I install Parallels, Windows 10, NX, Featurecam, Solidworks, Delcam, and a few other of my media softwares the things gonna be full.

So it seems my only option is to connect my 2TB external SSD and use parallels to create a VM and run directly from the external. This definitely is not my ideal solution but for the time being it may have to do. My question is has anyone ran CAD/CAM from a virtual machine? This will take days to reinstall the software, reload templates, tool libraries, reconfig setting,,,,,, I don't want to risk wasting all that time if what I am attempting to do will not work.

That's f**king nuts!

CAD/CAM you want yer primo storage right on the bus, wide-lane PCi-e ... not even on internal SATA nor external thundermug.

If you MUST run WinWoes apps, yes, virtualize that pile of shit.

But give the virtualizer "bare metal" to run on. It's CHEAP! See AMD Ryzen.

Then use a "real" Unix or "at least" a Linux for the mothership / hypervisor.

Mac has bent its bastardized-to-begin-with Unix into such a slow and BLOATED masturbatory piece of shite with a clumsy-ass actively user-hostile GUI it is dreadful to put up with - if even I still had the patience! "Better than Windows" isn't GOOD enough! It doesn't even have decent file system!

Clean up yer act, let each APP bring such eye-candy as is relevant, And no MORE than that. If only so yah can live with less bloat ....and more useful hours in yer life.

Screenshot_2020-05-29_13-19-09.jpg

OpenBSD installs from a cold start OR does twice a year binary update in under FIVE wall-clock minutes, after all.

"time pkg_add -u"

.. might record 10 to 30 wall-clock minutes, depending on your uplink.

Done. And on lowly Acer, 4-(real) core Ryzen, about $375 dual storage, (M2 Sata + Sata) user access thru a simple hatch. Old model, even. MUCH better can be had.

Or go and grab a "slackware" based Linux. The lean, light, fast, low-bloat ones.
When I have to run a Linux?

Welcome to VectorLinux — VectorLinux.com

OS X is for.... never mind.

My WIFE uses MacBook Pro hardware.

And she is not a sweaty fat girl with BO and zits. So that blows holes in one more Apple Mac generalization...

:D
 
If you store just data on the external, I don't think you would notice the speed differential on the usb drive. I know in windows you can define the data location pretty easily not sure on Mac
 
If you store just data on the external, I don't think you would notice the speed differential on the usb drive. I know in windows you can define the data location pretty easily not sure on Mac

What the Parallels VM does is actually allows you to install and run Windows and the other softwares directly on the external device. When you plug it in through the USB it just user the computer hardware. I have ran Windows on the virtual machine before and it works just fine, I just never tried running CAD/CAM from one.
 
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you bought a new macbook with the incorrect size internal SSD then I don't believe you can change that yourself on the new ones. I believe the drives are soldered to the mainboard. If you want a larger internal SSD you'll have to return it and order a new one.

Running an OS on an external drive is absolutely a viable option though! If you get an external drive that is thunderbolt (rather than USB 3) then you will get a max of 10Gb/s bandwidth which is huge. You should not notice any speed difference between the internal and external drives at that point (assuming you have a fast external drive).

USB 3 drives will be a bit slower, and they don't necessarily allow for the same kind of low-level disk management that Thunderbolt does...

You also might want to look into using Boot Camp for running CAD/CAM rather than Parallels as it will allow better use of the GPU. Either way will likely work fine though.
 
I managed to get out and get a new Macbook a few weeks ago after my other one finally had enough. There is not many Apple stores in this country and the online store has been out of stock from the virus lockdown. I finally settled on the only one in the store that had enough ass to do what i want. 32 gig ram, 3.8 processor, pretty much all the upgrades,,,,except some genius ordered it with only 512gb hard drive.

I think about it for a few minutes and just decided since its here I better get it and just swap the HD out when its available. Yeah, great move on my part, the new generation has all the components integrated to the system board! Swapping the drive is not an option. I now find myself with a $3k computer that by the time I install Parallels, Windows 10, NX, Featurecam, Solidworks, Delcam, and a few other of my media softwares the things gonna be full.

So it seems my only option is to connect my 2TB external SSD and use parallels to create a VM and run directly from the external. This definitely is not my ideal solution but for the time being it may have to do. My question is has anyone ran CAD/CAM from a virtual machine? This will take days to reinstall the software, reload templates, tool libraries, reconfig setting,,,,,, I don't want to risk wasting all that time if what I am attempting to do will not work.
We run 30 cad workstations on VMware esxi and horizon. Pretty neat technology.

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk
 
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you bought a new macbook with the incorrect size internal SSD then I don't believe you can change that yourself on the new ones. I believe the drives are soldered to the mainboard.

Could was. But OTHER makers offer plug-in PCie / NVMe / Sata on M2 .... or better. All are SMALL form-factor, so dual-storage is not as uncommon as may first appear. So long as ONE of them is the tiny plug-in the other may be a "brick".
 
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you bought a new macbook with the incorrect size internal SSD then I don't believe you can change that yourself on the new ones. I believe the drives are soldered to the mainboard. If you want a larger internal SSD you'll have to return it and order a new one.

Running an OS on an external drive is absolutely a viable option though! If you get an external drive that is thunderbolt (rather than USB 3) then you will get a max of 10Gb/s bandwidth which is huge. You should not notice any speed difference between the internal and external drives at that point (assuming you have a fast external drive).

USB 3 drives will be a bit slower, and they don't necessarily allow for the same kind of low-level disk management that Thunderbolt does...

You also might want to look into using Boot Camp for running CAD/CAM rather than Parallels as it will allow better use of the GPU. Either way will likely work fine though.

Thanks for the feedback, Yeah, after getting it home and doing research I realized this new gen doesn't have the ability of getting upgrades like the old ones. I was in such a hurry to buy it before someone else was in the store I didn't realize all the USB, and HDMI port had been swapped for this new USB C.

My external is a Toshiba Type C so should be fairly quick. Im kinda bummed about losing USB 2/3 and having to run my software keys through an adapter but tech has to change sometime.

Can't use Bootcamp because I need to be able to transfer files from Mac window to Windows window quite often.
 
Trealize all the USB, and HDMI port had been swapped for this new USB C.
Older gen (or 2 or 3 older?) has a mini-brick T-Bolt that has ALL that stuff run up and down the sides of it. Wife keeps a backup, here - another in HKG off of her one

..transfer files from Mac window to Windows window quite often.

You have NO second box? No fallback or redundancy? Fix that. Soon.

One computer is worse than having only one leg.

Dead 'puter can't HOP!

I just run gnarly stuff over the GigE and bounce it off the previous workstation - aged Thinkpad, AMD flavour. Or a CF card. Or even a USB - or whatever - rotating-drive external. Worst case, email it to myself. Server is in a bunker in Europe.

Pulled my servers out of Standard Chartered, Kowloon ages ago.
 
Thanks for the feedback, Yeah, after getting it home and doing research I realized this new gen doesn't have the ability of getting upgrades like the old ones. I was in such a hurry to buy it before someone else was in the store I didn't realize all the USB, and HDMI port had been swapped for this new USB C.

My external is a Toshiba Type C so should be fairly quick. Im kinda bummed about losing USB 2/3 and having to run my software keys through an adapter but tech has to change sometime.

Can't use Bootcamp because I need to be able to transfer files from Mac window to Windows window quite often.

Gotcha. I ran Solidworks on a Mac using Parallels/VMWare Fusion for a long time... With a decent machine and a good drive I don't think you'll have any issues!
 
You have NO second box? No fallback or redundancy? Fix that. Soon.

One computer is worse than having only one leg.

Dead 'puter can't HOP!

HAha, Yes I have my Imac at my house as well as our network and server at the office. It's just my laptop decided to take a nap. Once this covid starts dying down I'm pretty sure there will lots of hours in the sky. Delta and Qatar seem to think an Imac is a bit large for a carry on so had to replace my travel puter. For some reason I seem to get a lot more accomplished while flying, Maybe it's the wind noise drowning out anyone yapping for 16 hours.
 
I wouldn't use the external drive to house the VM (I'm guessing you're going to use it a lot) for one simple reason - plugging/unplugging cables constantly wears things out eventually, and a socket or cable will fail in the most inconvenient time... Murphy's law

512G should be enough for the Mac itself and to host a VM with Win(around 50G) and the rest of your software (probably no more than 100G) on the "C:" drive of your VM, I doubt it would take up more than 150G total, that would still leave 2/3 of the built in ssd capacity for the Mac and have space left to hold the 1st necessity stuff, rest of your user data - on the external drive

edit: P.S. a VM in your computer is basically a file, you can move that file around anywhere you want, back it up just like a word document, so even if you do start to run out of space on the internal ssd, it is just a matter of copying it over to external drive and running it from there, at least that is how VMware and Oracles Virtualbox VMs work, the only experience with Parallels I had was about a decade ago, but I'm sure it is basically the same way
 
HAha, Yes I have my Imac at my house as well as our network and server at the office. It's just my laptop decided to take a nap. Once this covid starts dying down I'm pretty sure there will lots of hours in the sky. Delta and Qatar seem to think an Imac is a bit large for a carry on so had to replace my travel puter. For some reason I seem to get a lot more accomplished while flying, Maybe it's the wind noise drowning out anyone yapping for 16 hours.

Gawd.. "not so fond" memories of lugging the original 1 GHz G4 17" MacBook Pro and a Zero Halliburton case for it .

. and thinking how NICE it was vs the Pilot's Flight "brain bag" the older Canon laptop.. the one that had the neat sheet-at-a time PRINTER built-in between the keyboard and mainboard.

Damn, it's nice to be retired...

When Apple left Power architecture for LCD WinTel? No longer any advantage,

I went back to AMD, any or all of the *BSD's, (multiboot "many" OS'en) and "whatever decent was cheap that cycle".

Not unusual for "top" to show all 8 cores at 100% idle, for a whole minute at a go. OpenBSD eats so little it was several months on the Acer before I ever heard the CPU fan come to life.

:)
 
thunderbolt 3 m.2 nvme enclosures are freely available, and much faster than usb type c.

Effectively the same bandwidth as a standard m.2 slot, as thunderbolt 3 and m.2 both occupy 4 pci-e lanes.
 
thunderbolt 3 m.2 nvme enclosures are freely available, and much faster than usb type c.

Effectively the same bandwidth as a standard m.2 slot, as thunderbolt 3 and m.2 both occupy 4 pci-e lanes.

"Effectively"?

One could WISH!

:D


Wrong word when comparing sitting DIRECTLY ON those lanes... to a cable and its interface and comms protocol & error handling that LEADS to those lanes ... after a great deal of kinky-fuckery latency and overheads have had their breakfast.
 
"Effectively"?

One could WISH!

:D


Wrong word when comparing sitting DIRECTLY ON those lanes... to a cable and its interface and comms protocol & error handling that LEADS to those lanes ... after a great deal of kinky-fuckery latency and overheads have had their breakfast.

To the best of my knowledge, there is practically no losses over thunderbolt 3 compared to a four lane pci-e 3.0 slot.

Thunderbolt basically is an external interface to pci-e. Graphics cards running in thunderbolt 3 pci-e enclosures seem to achieve the expected performance from 4 lanes, plenty of examples of that.
 
To the best of my knowledge, there is practically no losses over thunderbolt 3 compared to a four lane pci-e 3.0 slot.

Thunderbolt basically is an external interface to pci-e. Graphics cards running in thunderbolt 3 pci-e enclosures seem to achieve the expected performance from 4 lanes, plenty of examples of that.

Nine.

Well. Yeah. Plenty of examples of lots of things. ISS-80 14" "cartridge" drive's best work since I scrapped it - still a "current item" - has been donating its cabinet to supporting a surface plate.

Nine inches.

Re-implementing HPPI in fiber bought us better noise handling.

Nine inches per.

But it was the heavily "parallel" part as did the heavy lifting.

That damned nine inches per nanosecond thing.

ON the bus - as PHYSICALLY close as can be - isn't just about protocols.

A nanosecond is a very long time to wait on s**t for modern 'puters...

Buggers tend to fall asleep .. or even go on holidays with other priorities.. and have to be awakened from their slumbers .. or flown home from the South of France.

:)
 
1. The fundamental issue is that apple is using the T2 "security" (corporate arm twisting) chip to make it impossible for a user to swap the internal drive. You not only cannot upgrade it, take great care not to store anything on it that you don't have well backed up in some non-apple place.

2. Windows runs directly on the mac (but that doesn't get around the T2 lock.)

3. Get a thunderbolt case for the fastest external SSD and hook that to the mac (one thing they actually do well) - you should be fine.

I did try running on a mac for a while, and decided macos and apple's treatment of pcs was largely a p.o.s. And indeed, if you want to run CAD/CAM, why are you screwing about with a mac anyway? (I did it as an experiment and to get access to little snitch. I won't ever bother again.)
 
1. The fundamental issue is that apple is using the T2 "security" (corporate arm twisting) chip to make it impossible for a user to swap the internal drive. You not only cannot upgrade it, take great care not to store anything on it that you don't have well backed up in some non-apple place.

2. Windows runs directly on the mac (but that doesn't get around the T2 lock.)

3. Get a thunderbolt case for the fastest external SSD and hook that to the mac (one thing they actually do well) - you should be fine.

I did try running on a mac for a while, and decided macos and apple's treatment of pcs was largely a p.o.s. And indeed, if you want to run CAD/CAM, why are you screwing about with a mac anyway? (I did it as an experiment and to get access to little snitch. I won't ever bother again.)

The T2 chip has nothing to do with the internal drives. You can't swap the internal drive on the latest MacBooks because they are not a physically independent part - the flash memory is soldered directly onto the motherboard. This is not true of non-portable macs, which also have the T2 chip, but can have the ssd replaced. Of note on that subject, Apple ssds are not m.2 and the slot will not accept an m.2 ssd directly, but can accept an m.2 nvme ssd with a simple passive adapter.

The purpose of the T2 chip is to store and manage user biometrics and password information at a hardware level, fully independent of the operating system. It blocks repairs/replacement of hardware that is paired to biometrics, like the fingerprint sensor, but not general hardware like displays and memory etc. The reason for this is very simple - if someone steals your laptop, they can do absolutely nothing with it if they don't know the passwords - can't wipe it, can't use it. Makes it effectively worthless to anyone except the owner, or at the very most the value of the harvestable parts. Educated thieves will ignore the macbook and instead run off with the thinkpad sitting next to it.

On your last point, it's a purely subjective thing. I have long since realised that people who don't like macs just cannot fathom why other people do, and that arguing with them is about the most futile endeavour one can embark upon. Most people spurn macos because they don't understand it. I despise windows because I do understand it.
 








 
Back
Top