Embodiments described herein provide a storage conversion technique for rapidly converting between storage representations served by a storage system and presented to a host computer of a virtualized computing environment. The storage representations may include physical storage represented by a sequential set of blocks on disks of the storage system that are presented to the host computer in the form of a logical unit number (LUN) and virtual storage represented by a virtual storage device of the storage system that is presented to a hypervisor of the virtualized computing environment in the form of a virtual disk file. Illustratively, the LUN and virtual disk file may be storage objects (e.g., files) having different (file) types and formats in a volume of the storage system; yet each storage object may be organized as a buffer tree having indirect blocks that contain pointers configured to reference data blocks used to store data.