Would a system be faster on a virtual machine or on a Thuderbolt external drive?

[katbel]

I'm running Mojave on an iMac 2017. For some apps with no update available for Mojave
I need to have Big Sur installed.
Would VMWare be faster running Big Sur (if it is possible to install it there)
or a thunderbolt external SSD disk with Big Sur?

 

[fenderbass146]

I'm assuming when you say external, you will be dual booting? That will be faster without a doubt as you are running native...that said, depending on how demanding your program is and how much resources you have on your machine, VM will probably be nicer/more conventiant

 

[katbel]

I'm assuming when you say external, you will be dual booting? That will be faster without a doubt as you are running native...that said, depending on how demanding your program is and how much resources you have on your machine, VM will probably be nicer/more conventiant

External as an external thunderbolt disk, it would be nice dual booting , but alas no

 

[Juicy Box]

External as an external thunderbolt disk, it would be nice dual booting , but alas no

I am confused by what you are trying to do and what you are asking.

Are you saying that you do not want to dual boot using the TB drive?

 

[katbel]

I have Mojave on my iMac
I need to have Big Sur installed on a VM or on external drive

On the iMac i just have room for a minimal installation, cannot partition,
isn’t dual boot a disc partitioned in two on the main computer, with two different systems?

Plus I just discovered that VMware is free for personal use but needs Big Sur…
If I want to use the older version that still works with Mojave I need to buy it and it’s not cheap.
Few years ago I bought one version already for windows and it said free for life….yeah…

 

[Fishrrman]

If you want "an alternate boot drive", you DON'T NEED thunderbolt on a 2017 iMac.

All you need is USB3.1 gen2.
Plug it into one of the USBc ports (NOT into a USBa port).
This will give you read speeds in the 800-825MBps range -- it will boot and run with very snappy performance.

Get a "bare" nvme drive.
You probably don't even need a 1tb drive, 512gb will probably be "more than enough".
Even 256gb would do, but I don't know if they make them that small.

Get a USB3.1 gen2 enclosure.
There are MANY of these for very reasonable prices.

Put them together.
Erase to APFS using disk utility.
Install the OS onto the drive, along with the apps you need to run.

That's really about "all there is to it".

 

[katbel]

Erase to APFS using disk utility.
Install the OS onto the drive, along with the apps you need to run.

That's really about "all there is to it".

This is what I did on an external USB-C Crucial SSD disk. Installation took ages but now the disk is even faster than the internal one with Mojave ? Thx!