Usage of internal drive for machines on external drive

[alan123]

I'm running a windows 7 virtual machine on my external disk. How does this configuration affects my internal drive usage on my Mac OS X?
... what I mean:
Does each data read in the external drive is also read in the internal drive in order to let Virtual Box working?

[loukingjr]

If I understand your question there is nothing to read on the internal drive if the guest is installed on an external drive.

[mpack]

Does each data read in the external drive is also read in the internal drive in order to let Virtual Box working?

I suspect you have some strange notion of weird magic that VirtualBox performs in order to work. In fact VDI files are ordinary host files, accessed using normal host file I/O function calls, and there is nothing mysterious or unusual about them at all - except that they tend to be on the large side.

[alan123]

Hi, thanks for reply.
I just asked because I noticed a considerable increase of memory usage in the activity monitor. In that moment I was only using virtualbox, I installed Visual studio in the virtual machine but I noticed that Data Read was about 20gb and Data Write was 8gb. I was not sure about the behavior of virtualbox.