The space will be assigned in a large block instead of being added in smaller pieces. You also won’t see as much file fragmentation. There’s a trade-off here: a fixed-size disk uses more space on your hard disk, but adding new files to the virtual machine’s hard disk is faster. When you create a fixed-size disk, all 30 GB of that space would be allocated immediately. However, it’s slower than creating a fixed-size disk (also known as a preallocated disk). This can be convenient, as each virtual machine won’t take up an unnecessarily large amount of space on your hard drive. As you add more files to the virtual disk, it will expand up to its maximum size of 30 GB. After installing your operating system and programs, it may only take up 10 GB. By default, virtual machine programs will generally use dynamically allocated disks that grow as you use them.įor example, if you create a new virtual machine with a dynamically allocated disk with a maximum size of 30 GB, it won’t take up 30 GB of space on your hard disk immediately.
When creating your virtual machine, you can create two different types of virtual disks.
Create Fixed-Size Disks Instead of Dynamically Allocated Ones
