virtualbox.org

I am shopping for a new laptop, my current one is 500GB internal, and thinking of going for SSD, but the price of SSD is too high and I will be only able to afford the 256GB SSD for the laptop, and for the same price, I can get back 500 GB HDD.

If I am going for the SSD, it will not be enough for all my virtual machines, I found out that it is possible to put the VM images in an external drive, but the performance of this is not conclusive from my research, most of the sites mentioned that running the VM images from external drive will be slower than running the VM images from internal drive, besides probably this 10 year old post titled "The Single Most Important Virtual Machine Performance Tip".

Which one will be a better overall option for me?
256GB SSD + External Drive
or
500GB HDD?

I have a 256G SSD and a 1T HHD on my desktop and it works very well. I put all the VirtualBox files (including the .vdi) on the SSD and the performance is very good. I would go for the 256G SSD and the 500 G external drive option. I would move other files to the external drive to keep all the VBox files on the SSD.

ykphuah wrote:I found out that it is possible to put the VM images in an external drive

Do not separate images files (such as VDI) from the rest of the VM. If you want to locate the VDI on a secondary drive then that's fine, but move the whole VM there - there's no reason the split up the files. See Howto: Move a VM.

On the question: it's a common arrangement that a lot of people use. Even before SSDs I typically had a moderate sized (around 300GB) "system drive" while holds the OS, all apps and important data, plus I had a huge secondary drive (currently 2TB), which holds bulky and/or unimportant data - video clips etc. I only image the system drive for backup purposes. Only selected files (such as VMs) from the secondary drive get frequently backed up.