I’ve never been a fan of dual booting myself. The computer just ends up spending all of its time in one OS or the other. Plus Microsoft doesn’t seem to like to play nice with your bootloader.
I just started using Linux on secondary computers. Once I had gotten things down so the experience was smooth on those machines, moving the main desktop from Windows to Linux was pretty seamless.
It certainly could. That’s the gamble you’re taking.
I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.