Using that spare HDD / SSD for a Virtual Machine playground.

A few months ago i found myself having a spare SSD as i sold my loyal Macbook Pro 2013 ( yes i do miss the keyboard very much) So what can i do with this spare drive that's useful ?  First off I decided to house the SSD in a caddy and use it to cold store documents, a great solution for a lot of people but I wanted to make full use of this SSD drive.

After a few weeks of deliberating what to do i started to experiment setting up a virtual machine on the external drive using VMWare then lightly tested to see how it coped. Quite surprisingly it coped quite well with all operating systems ranging from Windows 10, Ubuntu, Kbuntu, Manjaro, OpenBSD all running with a small but healthy 6gb RAM and 2 CPU cores.

I must point out that this SSD was a refurb and died while being in my laptop however it was resurected somehow using DiskUtility but could not be trusted like before with important documents the whole reason for it being "repurposed"  in a portable caddy.

About 4 months into the experiment i was running Windows 10 as a virtual machine and started to see some issues with the screen freezing while using VSCode this resulted in the SSD loosing power almost immediately? - i feared the worse..

I unpluged the SSD caddy from my Macbook Pro and plugged it strait into the Windows PC with hopes i would see the blue power light to my surprise i did for about 8 seconds before it went out for good RIP.

A week went by and i was missing the whole freedom of hanving multiple operating systems at my disposal, so i decided to buy a new external Crucial x8 1Tb SSD, this drive is crazy fast when connected via the native USB C and has enough storage for all the operating systems i want with the added advantage of being smaller than the first SSD.

What operating systems do i need ? There are many OS out there to choose from, the most popular and widely available are Linux and Windows.
If you are using a Macbook you can have the best of all known operating systems, however it proves a little difficult to create a MACOS operating system on a virtual machine, not that it's impossible ofcourse.

My current setup is

Windows 10 - For making windows applications using Visual Code and test environment for installers.

System76 PoP! - For experiementing with Terminal and VI editor also used to write BASH scripts within a secure environment.

I will be including more operating systems to the playground over time and no doubt write about my findings. Stay tuned. !