Running Bootcamp on SSD or Parallels on SSD

[MarkieMark92]

Last night I brought a 500GB Lacie Thunderbolt/USB 3 SSD for my late iMac 2012 so that I am able to put Mac OS X onto it as well as hopefully Windows 7/ 10. I was going to go for bootcamp so I had Windows on the SSD as well but am now looking at buying Parallels and putting Windows onto the SSD using that. Is there any advantage of running Windows on SSD using Parallels than running Windows on HDD using Parallels? or would I be better doing it the bootcamp way? I just have this feeling I have brought the SSD for no reason :/

 

[Kappsi]

Running in Bootcamp directly is to me (on my 2012 rMBP) noticeably faster than running it inside Parallels. You could also set up Bootcamp on your SSD, then run that from Parallels if you prefer, as Parallels can run Bootcamp partitions. In this case, I would expect it (but I am guessing) to be slightly faster over a pure VM, as then you have an actual partition backing it and not a virtual disk. The virtual disk has to handle things like resizing, HFS+ overhead, and other checks, while the partition could theoretically be accessed directly. Both would of course be a lot faster than running on an HDD, whether through Parallels or directly through Bootcamp. Otherwise, using Bootcamp (on an SSD) within Parallels still gets good performance for me, just not as good as if I directly run Bootcamp.