How to add another hard drive to a virtual machine in Windows 10

A virtual machine is software that creates an independent layer and is able to emulate the operation of your PC with all of its components. You can add a second hard drive and if you don't know how to do it, in this article we will walk you through the steps. And we are sure that you will also be interested to know that you can install an operating system on an external hard drive .

How to add another hard drive to a virtual machine?

This procedure of adding a second hard drive can be done with an existing virtual machine, or it is also possible by adding a hard disk when you customize the virtual machine hardware when it is created, all without the need for clone the virtual. machine.

Considering an example, you might need to provide additional disk space for an existing virtual machine with a fairly heavy workload. When creating the virtual machine, it is recommended to add a second hard disk previously configured as a that boot disk.

• What you need to do is very simple, just make sure you are familiar with the settings and warnings to add this hard drive.
• Before adding another hard drive over 2 TB, you must make sure of the conditions and limits of this action.
• Now you need to make sure that you have this privilege, so go to Virtual Machine, then go to Settings and finally Add new disk in destination folder.

During the virtual machine creation procedure, a hard disk and a SCSI or SATA controller are added by default to the virtual machine depending on the operating system used.

If the hard drive did not perform as expected, did not meet your needs, you can remove it and add a new one when the creation process is complete. If you add several hard disks to create a virtual machine , you can add it to multiple controllers and thus improve performance.

What is the procedure?

The first thing to do is to right click on the virtual machine in the inventory and select the option Modify the parameters.

This second step is not essential to do. If you want delete existing hard drive , you need to move your cursor over the drive and click on the delete icon, you can increase the size of the hard disk in a virtual machine .

You will see how the virtual machine disk is deleted. If you have another virtual machine that shares the same disk, the files on the disk will not be deleted. Locate the Virtual Hardware or Virtual Hardware tab and select the New option

Hard drive or New hard drive , and from the drop-down menu, select New device and click Add. You will be able to see the added hard drive in the device list.

You should now expand New Hard Drive. If you wish, you can enter a value for the disk and from the drop-down menu select the units.

Now select the location of la database in which you will save your virtual machine files. Select the format of the virtual machine disks and now click Next.

You will be able to see in the drop-down menu the option Shares where you will have to select a value to be able to assign the shared use to the virtual disk.

Select now Personalized or Personalized and enter a number of shares in the text box. And in the Limit - IOPs section, you need to specify the upper limit of storage that will be allocated to the virtual machine or just select the Ultimited option. Ultimited is the upper limit of I / O operations per second allocated to the virtual disk.

Finally, you need to either accept the default virtual device node or just select a different one. Typically, the default virtual device node should be accepted.

It is very useful for a hard drive to use a node other than the default one to control the boot order, or it is also good to have different types SCSI controllers .

It would be very convenient to boot from an LSI Logic controller and share a data disk with another virtual machine using a Buslogic controller with bus sharing enabled.

This last step is optional, it is not essential, but if you wish you can select a disk mode then click on Ok or OK.