Originally Posted by
Keithel
I think I may understand your concern, and, if I understand it, your concern is unfounded.
The following is based on my experiences with VMware VMs, and not with virtual box -- though I believe Virtual Box acts the same in these regards.
When you create a virtual disk, you can specify for it to have a specific size, say, 200GB. If you create it with default options, you will see that the generated file is *not* 200GB, but instead is just a few hundred kilobytes, or, after doing an install of the OS to it, it may be a few gigabytes. The reason this is the case is, generally, by default, virtual disks are created so they only take up as much space as is being *used* in the virtual disk (at least initially). They will grow to fill the 200GBs (the actual size of the virtual disk file will not have a direct correlation to the amount of data stored on the disk).
Now, when you create the virtual disk, you can specify it to pre-allocate the space of the entire virtual disk - in this example, 200GB. When this is done, you will indeed see that the virtual disk file is 200GB.
Hope that clears up some of your confusion!
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