As the title asks, I'm wondering if it's safe to continue running and installing VMs on my second hard drive.
I realize it's impossible to prevent eventual failure of the drive itself, but given that it's relatively new, I'd like to make sure I'm doing everything I can to extend its use.
For that reason, I'm worried if my installation of VMs on this second drive is a bad choice with regard to the drive's longevity.
I only install these machines to play around with and essentially test-run certain Linux distros. I don't run anything heavy, and usually find myself removing a handful of packages that come shipped with some.
I probably could have worded my title better, but the gist of what I'm trying to grasp is this: will running my machines ever so often cause excessive strain to my HDD and will it provide increased risk of failure?
I've heard people say that depending on your set-up, running some VMs could cause the same effect one would see from a gaming-PC—such that the drive wears out a lot sooner than expected.
As far as I'm concerned, my build is fairly decent in that I don't expect problems to arise any time soon.
I have plenty of RAM (16GB), lots of space for the VMs (1TB), and my processor is fairly decent (for my standards anyway). It's an AMD-FX6300 [3.6GHz].
Thus far, I haven't really suffered any drop in performance, but then again, it's not like I've been using any tools to diagnose that either.
The secondary disk I'm referring to is a WesternDigital HDD, for those that are interested.
I only recently discovered that WD had a tool for diagnostic purposes, and have since installed that on my machine.
To wrap up/TL;DR:
I'm running Windows 10 Pro on an SSD. I mainly use the second drive for storage purposes, but any static data that's there is backed up to several other locations. In other words, data-loss isn't really a concern for me. What I'm concerned about is the health of my second drive and if there are any additional or extensive threats on it's performance as well as overall longevity if I choose to continue to install & run VMs on it.
I'm not that well endorsed in how the mechanics work (i.e. never been a technician or anything).
It's also worth mentioning that even though I'd like to consider myself as more knowledgeable than the average end-user, I only just recently started getting into VMs.
I'm still not even sure how it all fits together, and only that it enables me to try out certain Linux distros.
Any advice and or insight would surely be appreciated.
Thanks!
- T.R.G.