Safe to share external hard drive with VM?

I have an iMac running Sequoia and successfully set up a VM running Mojave in order to keep using some 32 bit apps that do not work in Sequoia.

I have an external HD connected via Thunderbolt to the iMac. It has all my large image and video files on it so needs to be generally accessible. I also have a second external HD set up to perform Time Machine backups.

Ideally I would also be able to access both of these within the VM, but the HDs are not a NAS so I'm worried this could corrupt the data if it was mounted / accessed in both environments. I noticed yesterday the external is appearing in the VM within the Shared folder in the sidebar (not one I set up or have used before, it's under iCloud in the sidebar.)

Is it a bad idea to access the external drive while it's still mounted in Sequoia in my main environment?

Thanks!! I'm still pretty new to this.