The external drive is indeed an SSD. It's a Samsung T7 Shield which claims to have very high performance as USB/Thunderbolt interface. I think it's about as good as I can get given my laptop is the same vintage as BIAB (2019 - Intel Mac).

I already have it on my list to upgrade because I like better push/placement granularity for chords in the later versions and I think other items like more stems and "every track acts the same" (just loose features I seem to remember from looking at this a while ago) were things I thought I'd get some milage out of. Still, 2019 is fairly new to me since my first BIAB version was DOS based.

Planning on pseudo-renewing at the end of the year so I get one more newer version. Half way there ...

I too think the bottleneck is how I have the "J:\" drive shared. I think I'm kind of shooting myself a bit in the foot here, so to speak. There are more virtually more direct ways to connect even this external drive. I've got other things happening in this VM that prevented me from making any changes to the VM. I will eventually experiment with modifying the configuration eventually when the other constraints go away. Certainly when I upgrade I'll need to consider to get the Mac version to avoid the virtualization layer. I did think at some point that the Mac version was trailing the Windows version in terms of feature-set.

1/1/2024 - Win 10 BIAB 2019 64bit Build (644), RealBand 2019 (4)
Prior - Sig can't fit a running list - so just showing current version