>>And I have half of that disk to a VM file to run W7. W7 now boots much faster than when it had its own SSD (which died after two years, BTW - an Intel).
>
>I think at one point you said you were using VirtualBox on Ubuntu to run your VMs (?) How has that worked for you?
>
>A number of years ago I got the impression it wasn't a good experience (might have been the 3.x days) but Oracle has been putting some effort into it lately with the latest 4.x and 5.x branches. I've only used it on Windows, it's been pretty good.

It's excellent. I'm flipping between W7 and Ubuntu at will, clipboard works both ways, and the only flaw is the way it handles the USB connections - you need to assign devices one by one, which probably requires knowing the device ID. I haven't bothered with that, left all USB devices to Ubuntu, and if there's anything that needs to be visible from W7 I copy it to a shared partition.