Put VM on WD MyBook

Question

I put a few guest OSes on mybook. So, when I need to do my work, I would power on the mybook and use the VMware workstation to start the visualization.

Since I would have to access mybook for a long period of time, and since working inside the virtual OS would cause constant read/write to the harddisk itself. I afraid that what I do would degrade the performance of mybook, significantly shorten the lifespan of it or worse, increase the risk of bad sectors on the mybook hard disk.

Is my fear warranted?

Answer 1

I've been running various linux distributions from Western Digital Passport drives for the last few years. I have not lost any files or suffered any corrupted data that could not be fixed.

It's designed to be used heavily, so I say use it.

Here's an interesting comment I found here -

A study by Google a while back concluded, among other things, that if the drive doesn't fail within the first year (so called "infant mortality") it's actually likely to have a relatively long and healthy life.

Answer 2

Since your Mybook contains a standard hard disk, there should be no difference to other hard disks built into your computer.