Recommendations for a fast external hard drive to run Parallels

Greetings,
My Parallels VM currently resides on my Mac SSD HD.
I cannot shrink the .vm file due to incompatibility with Mojave APFS.
See the thread "Mac host file system corruption during shrinking of PD13 Win10 VM" in the
Installation and Configuration forum.
It's actually PD14 now. Upgrading did not help.
I don't do a whole lot with the Win10 VM. It is used a lot for video playback.
Thank you for any and all advice.