8-minute delay when starting Windows 11 VM with connected Kingston XS2000

Hi all!

I encountered the following issue: the virtual machine with Windows 11 Pro hangs during startup or starts with an 8-minute delay if an external USB drive, Kingston XS2000 4TB, is connected and set in the USB settings to always connect to this Windows 11 virtual machine.



In the Boot Order section the only Hard Disk is selected



When the virtual machine starts, this is what happens:

• After pressing the Start button, a black screen appears with a dimmed gray Parallels logo, and this lasts for about 3 minutes and 42 seconds.
  
  
• After that, the screen of the virtual machine goes black for another 4 minutes and 29 seconds before the system begins to load.
  
  
• 10 seconds to load Windows 11 and I able to log in to the system and see that drive already connected

When rebooting, there are no issues, and the disk remains connected to the machine. However, when the machine is turned off and then turned on, the problem reappears.

I have another Samsung 970 EVO 4TB 2,5" drive placed in an Orico 2169C3 enclosure, and with this drive, under the same settings, there are no issues at all - the VM starts, stops, and restarts in seconds, and the disk connects properly.

I also have two other virtual machines:

• Windows 7 Ultimate x64: If disks are automatically connected to this VM, there are no issues during startup in either case, even if both drives are connected simultaneously.
• Ubuntu Linux 24.04 x64: When the Kingston XS2000 drive is automatically connected to this VM, it behaves similarly to the Windows 11 VM. However, with the Samsung 970 EVO, it works flawlessly.

I tried downgrading Parallels to version 19, but the result is the same.

Here are the specs:

• MacBook Pro 16" (2019) i7/16GB/512GB
• Parallels Desktop 20 for Mac Version 20.1.1 (55740) via subscription and installed from DMG (not the App Store version)
• Windows 11 Pro 24H2 virtual machine
  • 4 vCPUs
  • 6GB RAM
  • 64GB NVMe disk

The difference between the Windows 7 VM and the other two is that the latter use an EFI bootloader.
Since such a long startup time and the option of manually connecting the drive after the system boots are not acceptable, I would greatly appreciate assistance in resolving this issue.

Thank you in advance!

 

BTW, I installed the latest VMWare Fusion Pro and it doesn't have such problem when this drive connected to the converted VM nor with the new one. But here is the other problem - I don't want to use VMWare on my MacBook because it doesn't works not so smooth as Parallels.

 

VMWare doesn't works so smooth as Parallels on my MacBook Pro.

 

Hmmm, interesting... After Parallels was updated to the version 20.1.2 (55742) start delay reduced from 8 minutes to 30 seconds. Will do additional tests tomorrow.

 

The happiness was short-lived... The problem returned after a few hours.