If I use an external hard drive, could I fill up the entire drive with files inside of the vault and still be able to preview them when I unlock them?
From the perspective of Cryptomator’s virtual drive, there is no difference if the target location is on an external hard drive or elsewhere.
Sooo I’m not sure what you mean by being able to preview the files. 
Sorry for the confusion. I just mean viewing the files once decrypted, however that’s done.
So my main question is if I could fill up the entire drive, I would still be able to decrypt the files and use them normally, right?
I guess I’ve answered my own question, but wanted to double check.
If you create a vault on an external (lets say 1TB) hard drive, you can fill the vault up to the capacity of that drive (i.e. 1TB). If you want to use Cryptomator to encrypt a local storage device without synchronizing it to some slow (internet-connected) storage backend, I’d recommend other solutions, such as VeraCrypt.
Cryptomator is created with cloud synchronization in mind. VeraCrypt on the other hand is designed for hard disks. Without the need to encrypt every single file at its own (which is useful for cloud storage services) VeraCrypt doesn’t leak information like the number of files or their individual sizes.
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Oh, ok. I don’t mind providing that information. I just don’t know of a larger container would take longer to decrypt and if it would wear the hard drive (with Veracrypt).