could i benefit by running parallels and windows on a seperate ext hd, or would that defeat the entire purpose of simultaneous interaction between xp and osx. i ask this because i am intending to use various recording, editing software like protools,live6 and masterwriter for creating my own music videos.these programs are rom,ram,cpu pigs. i would rather pay more money right now going in the right direction before i install all this stuff on one hd and and start running into problems later. i-mac 20 intel,core2duo,250g/1g ram.i assume i'll probably need another gig of ram,but what about adding ext hd. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
I keep my VMs on an external hard drive. I have six Linux VMs as well as XP and Vista, so this saves a lot of space on my internal drive. The only issue is unless you have a FW800 connection, disk access is going to be considerably slower than keeping your VM local so if disk access speed is an issue, don't do this. Also, remember that you won't actually be "running XP on an external HD" - it'll be running inside a VM being controlled by the Parallels application running in OS X booted off your startup disk. Keeping your VMs on another disk has only one advantage. It saves internal HD space. It won't improve RAM or CPU usage.
