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VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) and its successor VHDX are file formats representing a virtual hard disk drive (HDD). They may contain what is found on a physical HDD, such as disk partitions and a file system , which in turn can contain files and folders .
A virtual drive is a software component that emulates an actual disk drive, such as an optical disc drive, a floppy disk drive, or a hard disk drive. To other programs, a virtual drive looks and behaves like an actual physical device. A virtual disk may be in any of the following forms: Disk image, a computer file that contains the exact data ...
In computer science, storage virtualization is "the process of presenting a logical view of the physical storage resources to" [1] a host computer system, "treating all storage media (hard disk, optical disk, tape, etc.) in the enterprise as a single pool of storage."
A logical disk, logical volume or virtual disk (VD [1] or vdisk [2] for short) is a virtual device that provides an area of usable storage capacity on one or more physical disk drive(s) in a computer system. The disk is described as logical or virtual because it does not actually exist as a single physical entity in its own right. The goal of ...
Creating a virtual disk image of optical media or a hard disk drive is typically done to make the content available to one or more virtual machines. Virtual machines emulate a CD/DVD drive by reading an ISO image. This can also be faster than reading from the physical optical medium. [20] Further, there are less issues with wear and tear.
For example, a high-end disk subsystem may be a single SCSI device but contain dozens of individual disk drives, each of which is a logical unit. Further, a RAID array may be a single SCSI device, but may contain many logical units, each of which is a "virtual" disk—a stripe set or mirror set constructed from portions of real disk drives.
[citation needed] Other terms used include logical disk, [4] minidisk, [5] portions, [6] pseudo-disk, [6] section, [6] slice [7] and virtual drive. [8] One of the earliest such segmentation of a disk drive was IBM's 1966 [9] usage in its CP-67 operating system of minidisk as a separate segment of a hard disk drive. [5]
VMDK (short for Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.