osx - Could Writing to External Window Drive from Virtual Machine on Mac Damage the External Drive?

I have an external drive that I use with my Windows laptop, and contains all my important files. The drive is in NTFS format.

Now, on my Mac laptop, I have installed a Windows 7 virtual machine (using Virtualbox). When I try to write to the portable disk from the virtual machine, it says it is write protected, and thus I can't write to it. Now, I think I can easily change the setting so that the portable disk is not write protected; however, my questions is the following:

If I write from the Windows virtual machine on Mac to this portable disk, is there any chance of damaging the disk based on incompatible formatting of Mac and Windows, and losing files?

I had asked a similar question somewhere else, and the answer is the following:

You are told this because OS X is mounting the drive and you are accessing the disk through OS X. OS X as read-only NTFS support. You cannot mount NTFS under OS X without using FUSE and NTFS-ng. If you could get your VM to mount the filesystem instead of OS X (I use Parallels, which will do this) then Windows is capable of mounting the NT filesystem read-write and you should have no issues (no more than you would native Windows, anyway). Just make sure to unmount the filesystem before sleeping the VM.

Errors can always appear on drives and can be due to a number of different issues. Power spikes, even cosmic rays! That is why it is a good idea to check the drives from time to time with a decent checking utility.

In your case, there is no risk from running Windows in a virtual environment under OSx. However, there is a tiny risk from writing within a virtual environment across USB. This could happen for example if both the host and the guest OS's were heavily loaded - it is possible but not likely that this could cause a write glitch.

I truth though, I wouldn't really expect this to be much more likely than might happen from native OS access.

Check the disk every 6 months or so if using daily with a tool such as Spinrite or something similar.

Of course, you should always have good backups.