Create Virtual Hard Drives with various states for testing drive encryption

I working on a project involving drive encryption. The project is going to be preforming various encryption/decryption operations on hard drives. In order to easily test various operation quickly I am wondering if there is good way to to have many small Virtual Hard Drives in various states (encrypted, decrypted, paused encryption, ect). These Virtual hard drives then could be tested from the same starting point every time, so ever time I start a new test set each of the various drives will start at their pre-set state.

Would the best way to accomplish something like this be through virtual machines, docker, disk images, or some other way?