Dell EMC PowerVault MD 34XX/38XX Series Storage Arrays Administrator's Guide

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Advantages of thin virtual disks

Thin virtual disks, also known as thin provisioning, present a more logical storage view to hosts.

Thin virtual disks allow you to dynamically allocate storage to each virtual disk as data is written. Using thin provisioning helps to eliminate large amounts of unused physical capacity that often occurs when creating standard virtual disks.

However, in certain cases, standard virtual disks may provide a more suitable alternative compared to thin provisioning, such as in situations when:

you anticipate that storage consumption on a virtual disk is highly unpredictable or volatile
an application relying on a specific virtual disk is exceptionally mission critical