When AV scannng in Windows a shared external drive, the scanning is slow,, much slower i would say han if it was directly attached. however i can’t directly attach in VM, because the drive in question is Mac formatted (Mac OS Extended Journaled) HFS+. So i usually mount on Mac desktop, then add a share folder in VMWare Fusion

The alternatives i reckon would be no better SMB/AFP, simply because a locally attached drive is always gotta be better performance than a network share (even over a VMWare shared folders) as long as its still on the device, not remote

Although very slow, is this my only option from a performance perspective? The USB drive is 4TB. I believe if the drive was exFAT or NTFS and directly attached to Windows VM,, it would be faster.