jar50972 Posted January 21, 2012 Share Posted January 21, 2012 What's up guys, I've decided to go the way of the Mac, at least in the Hackintosh way. I'm getting a Dell Latitude E6400 (perfect compatiblity BTW!), and just found out that it has the ability to hold two harddrives. I plan on putting a SSD as the boot drive, and a 1TB as storage/programs/games drive. I want to dual boot OSX Lion and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. But I need to know the size of SSD I need to get. What size would you guys say is a good size to dual boot Lion and Windows 7, all the while not packing it in tight with barely any space left? A side question, is there a way that Windows and Mac could both dip into the 1TB, like running Windows and Mac programs from the same partition? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jar50972 Posted January 22, 2012 Author Share Posted January 22, 2012 Anybdoy? Why does no one ever reply? Can you not see my posts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted January 22, 2012 Share Posted January 22, 2012 Windows 7 can grow pretty big over time, it keeps old .dlls and other system/common files around even when you install new versions, as with for example a visual basic or DirectX update. Everytime you install a program that also installs external .dlls, they will stay somewhere on your hard drive and I believe they will stay there even if you uninstall that program. Note that these go somewhere in the user folder or the Windows folder hierarchy, so even if you install programs to another drive you'll still be slowly filling up your boot drive. There is also the invisible "Virtualstore" folder somewhere in your user folder hierarchy, any data from a program that tries to write to the "Program Files" folders (both x86 and 64) will get redirected there. Of course this will not happen as frequently if you install programs to another drive, but it will still happen. Besides Virtualstore, many apps and games will place configuration files and other data somewhere in your user hierarchy, without asking you first. This will happen on Lion as well, even if you have your applications installed to a separate drive, lots of data go to hidden system folders. Although you can prevent it in some instances, there is no way to completely keep your OS installation from expanding over time. Instead of going for a percieved bare minimum, I'd just get the biggest drive I could afford. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jar50972 Posted January 22, 2012 Author Share Posted January 22, 2012 Thanks, that's good advice. I believe I can afford a 120gb ssd for now. Can Lion and WIn7 both access files from the 1TB drive? Or do I have to make 2 500GB partitions that both can access? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gringo Vermelho Posted January 22, 2012 Share Posted January 22, 2012 If you format it as exFAT you can use it R/W for both. OS X can read NTFS but write support is not 100% reliable. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jar50972 Posted January 22, 2012 Author Share Posted January 22, 2012 Thanks for your help! I will remember you when I am booting into my Dell Hackbook! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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