Mounting external drives in Windows 11 VM

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop on a Mac with Apple silicon' started by strells, Oct 31, 2025.

  1. strells

    strells Product Expert

    Messages:
    574
    Strangely, this is the first time I am attempting this on my M3 MacBook Air. This always worked perfectly fine on my Intel-based laptops, so I'm wondering if this is an Apple Silicon issue.
    I can get exFAT and NTFS (I also have NTFS for Mac so NTFS drives mount on the Mac side as well) formatted external drives to appear as shared folders with drive letters in Windows, but when I connect them directly to the VM (Devices menu -> USB -> select the drive), the shared folder goes away as expected, but the drive does not appear at all in Windows, not even in Disk Management.
    In Device Manager, I do get "USB Attached SCSI (UAS) Mass Storage Device" under Storage Controllers, but it has the little warning symbol.
    Is this just not possible with Apple Silicon (ARM) Windows?
     

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