Whonix Workstation image comes with a 100GB hard drive (/dev/sda) for general work, which is a fair size. But I want to run a local node for the Monero cryptocurrency on my Whonix machine and use it on the workstation. I was wondering if it’s better to simply create a fixed size (e.g. 200 GB) VDI file to store the blockchain or if I should use the dynamic sized feature that is supposed to be future-proof (once the blockchain passes 200 GB it will increase the storage device size to accommodate it).
So what’s the best option in this case? Dynamic size or fixed size? Are there big differences (that one can notice) in terms of disk speed, writing speed?
Fixed size will be faster but you likely won’t notice in practice. Dynamic size, however, does not mean it will grow indefinitely but only as big as the predefined size. Fixed size will immediately allocate all the disk space so you it will really use 100GB. The Whonix disk images are sparse/dynamic disks which in the beginning actually only use a few GB of real disk space. Dunno at what speed the Monero blockchain grows but using a large dynamically growing image should be sufficient.
Just reporting back that I used a dynamic sized storage device and it worked like a charm, no issues there and the blockchain was successfully downloaded in the new mounted partition.