Run a two HD system, one in Windows, one in Linux back them up however you wish?
"Run a two HD system, one in Windows, one in Linux back them up however you wish?"
That is what I usually do and speaking of which a SSD (solid state drive) is much to be preferred over a HDD (mechanical hard drive). And even then there is that of
M.2 and NVMe drives are becoming more popular in modern PC builds.... Unlike standard HDDs and SSDs, M.2 drives aren’t connected to a motherboard via a cable, they’re instead plugged directly into the motherboard using a dedicated M.2 connector slot.... It’s important to note that M.2 SSDs which utilize the SATA interface aren’t really faster than standard 2.5” drives, they just take up less space and look cleaner. If you want faster speeds, you’ll have to make sure your M.2 drive is utilizing the NVMe
NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express, and it refers to the way in which data is moved, rather than the shape of the drive itself.. Depending on your NVMe drive’s manufacturer, you can see speeds as much as five or six times faster than a SATA-based equivalent...There are some NVMe drives that are designed to fit into a standard PCIe motherboard slot much like a graphics card, but most NVMe drives use the M.2 form factor.
More: https://www.newegg.com/insider/m-2-and-nvme-ssds-what-are-they-and-how-do-they-benefit-your-pc/
Thus a SSD is far better than a HDD, and NVMe drives are much better than a SATA SSD, and this includes using a page file for RAM if you do not have enough, yet.
"Under best case lab conditions the fastest SSD is 46 times slower than DDR3 RAM." DDR4 is even faster. "RAM can serve up data in memory 1000 times faster than a NVMe drive even though the file size they can carry is about the same." "when you only have 8GB of RAM windows will take any file or program not used in the last 5 seconds and make a page file out of it and store it to the drive....So you see the issue with too little RAM is that after a while you have more and more items shuffling back and forth from system memory to drive and back again." - http://www.m-techlaptops.com/ShopOnline/pc/How-to-boost-your-computers-speed-and-longevity-d67.htm
All of which is relevant to using a VM.