Using Virtual Box with only the OS (virtual disc file) on a SSD

Question

I would like to use Virtual Box to run Linux Mint 15 on Windows 8.1. My solid state drive has roughly 20 GB available memory. Is there a way to make so the virtual machine will boot from the solid state drive, but have the virtual hard drive for the virtual machine on the hard drive (which has over 500 GB available memory). The Linux Mint OS takes roughly 10 GB, so it will fit on the solid state drive, but I would like to use memory on the hard drive for everything else of the virtual machine in order to save SSD space for future use. I may be misunderstanding how exactly a virtual machine works, so I'm not entirely sure this is a valid question.

I've looked around and I saw the "solid state drive" under the storage configuration, but it seems that this is for the entire virtual hard drive, which I don't want to store on my SSD.

Answer 1

I would setup your VM like you would any multi-disc/multi-partition computer. I would create a virtual disk for the OS that is physically located on the SSD, and then another virtual disk(s) for your other files. When you're configuring the OS, mount the SSD backed disk as the root partition and then the HD backed disks on /home or /opt or wherever you plan to keep the non-OS files.

You can add additional discs to your machine via the "Storage" section of the machine settings.

Answer 2

You could create the entire VM on the SSD as normal, and then move the image files for the virtual hard drive to your large drive and use an NTFS symbolic link in the original location so the VirtualBox continues to run from the SSD.

Even fancier, you could create 2 virtual drives for your VM, and keep the file for a small boot drive on the SSD, and have a larger file host the rest of the filesystem live on your host's big drive.

Wikipedia has good page on Windows symbolic links here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link