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Just a warning: Virtualbox with hard drive files on an external USB hard disk has been broken for me on Catalina on my both of my Mac Minis (late 2012, 2018) an
by sdrothrock 6y ago
Just a warning: Virtualbox with hard drive files on an external USB hard disk has been broken for me on Catalina on my both of my Mac Minis (late 2012, 2018) and iMacs (late 2012, mid 2017).
That particular functionality worked fine on Mojave.
It works fine as long as I keep my VDI files on my system drive, but that can be a pain since they're so large.
- aruggirello 6y agoThis is, in my experience, a major pain point of VirtualBox that I don't see why Oracle apparently doesn't care about, despite being aware of the issue since at least 2017. We're stuck in a situation where fixed-size disk images are too large to use if you care about your host's disk space (unless they're created with an "almost full" target usage), and dynamic sized images tend to grow to unwieldy sizes unless you regularly zero-out empty spaces from the guest (cat /dev/zero >somefile on Linux, sdelete -z C on Windows IIRC), then VBoxManage modifyhd --compact the image from the host once the VM is off. But it shouldn't be this way. VirtualBox added support for TRIM years ago, and guest OSes could very well happily live inside dynamic images - if it worked at all. In practice (AFAIK, for the few who ventured to use it) - it doesn't work: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16795 https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/16795
- verisimilitude 6y agoExternal VDIs -- that's exactly my use-case, but I've stayed back on Mojave. Any bug page I should follow to see if this gets resolved for Catalina?
- sdrothrock 6y agoI'm not sure, honestly; there used to be a really long forum thread with random hacks that helped some (but not all) people and there were apparently a lot of conflated bugs that confused the whole thing, so I stopped trying to follow it and gave up.