virtualbox.org

I am a Vbox newbie using 6.0.0, so my apologies if this question has been answered before.

I am using a MacOS Mojave host with a Windows 10 guest. I used the HDD(HDS) file from an old Parallels Desktop installation. Everything is working great so far.

Is there any advantage to converting my HDD disk image to a VDI (or other format)?

Thanks for the help!

VDI is the format supported best from VirtualBox. There are some operations that are only supported on a VDI for example. I'm not an expert on the pluses and minuses of each and every format, with the HDD being the least one used/mentioned in the forums (being OSX only).

Let's say you're working with a spreadsheet in LibreOffice. Would you work in the native ODS format or in the XLS/XLSX format, that's there just for compatibility? I know that I'm working with ODS...

If you're using VirtualBox and suffer corruption to your VM, it better be in VDI format if you expect to find the expertise to help you around here: that's just a fact.

I think your question can be turned on its head: is there a disadvantage to converting HDD to VDI? And the answer is a simple no. First, the container format makes no difference to the contents of the drive as seen by the guest: it only makes a difference to what you can do with it on the host. Second, the cloning/conversion process doesn't destroy your original, so it's not like there's any danger involved. Make a backup first (of the whole VM folder) if you want to be super careful.