Removing 15 GB in files from Guest has no impact on .hdd size?

[bobbyt]

I'm trying to free up some disk space eon my Mac, and decided it might be a good time to perform a cleanup on my Windows 10 Guest OS.

I brought the drive inside the VM from over 40 GB to just over 20 GB, and getting properties on the drive inside the Guest OS shows this to be true.

I then shut down the Guest and chose reclaim disk space. It saved about 2 GB so now the entire guest takes up 42 GB instead of 44 GB.

Why is it that a .hdd image containing only 24 GB still occupies over 40 GB on my Macs HD???

 

[bobbyt]

I thought it might be specific to the .hdd image so I went ahead & created a new drive, then ran a clone program to duplicate it...

The end result still occupied 42 GB. I checked on partitions to see if that had anything to do with it, but in total it accounted for only a couple of GB...
I know macOS keeps time machine content hidden on the hd, I'm wondering if Windows 10 does something like this, as maybe that would account for the extra HD space being consumed?

 

[bobbyt]

From what I can tell the Guest HD can't go below 40...

I decided to try and fill the Guest completely, and did so by duplicating a sizable file inside several times.

Upon filling up the disk, I found the HD image was just a tiny bit bigger than the actual data occupied (95 GB occupied inside the Guest, 97 GB .hdd image). So there isn't a mystery bloat going on...

I then removed the added files and realized disk space, which again brought the space inside the Guest to 28 GB & the .hdd down to 40 GB...