Random corruption sharing a physical disk with a VM (and a real instance)

[m00dawg]

I'm really trying hard to get a good workflow going with VMWare Workstation. I run Linux most of the time and use VMWare for running a Windows 10 VM, mostly for photographic work (scanning film and Lightroom). I have set it up so that the VM's OS drive is an LVM raw mount on my host that sits on an SSD. Then I have a data drive that is a spinning disk which I also occasionally like to use when I boot into a standalone install of Windows 10. The latter is primarily because Lightroom can REALLY bog down on large scans on the VM and it doesn't seem to do that when booting directly in.

I have noticed also though that I get random data corruption on the data drive. This seems to happen with regular use but can really show itself when I share the drive between the physical and VM installs although it does seem to happen even when I don't do that. It'll randomly corrupt files in a seemingly nonsensical way. I set the VM to use the physical drive to try and avoid that kind of stuff and also to get better performance but seems like I'm getting neither.

Any thoughts/tips on how to better handle that? I thought about using an iSCSI volume within the VM itself that was mapped to my NAS but I only have 1gb to it and in times past I found I'd run into that limitation often. Lightroom doesn't like to use shared volumes so I can't simply setup a share to my NAS.

I'm on the free version currently. I had planned on buying it but given the issues I'm running into, it's currently not worth that investment 😕

[continuum]

If you share a physical partition between host and guest make sure that you never ever:
- mount the partition from host and guest at the same time !
- suspend the VM while it has the shared partition mounted !
If you do any of the things above you will corrupt the filesystem on the shared partition.

[m00dawg]

Yep, I can't mount it at the same time since I only run VMWare on Linux and run physical Windows on the same host. I also never suspend, but yeah good point to something I need to make sure I continue to avoid.

EDIT: Unmarked as answered as while the last suggestions avoid data corruption for sure, I'm still getting it in spite of already doing those things. I think something else is amiss.