07-10-2010, 12:46 PM

I purchased a new mac book pro with the 128 SSD. In hindsight, I'm wishing I shelled out the 400 more for a larger drive.

I'm going to be installing windows on bootcamp (which takes up about 19GB?) and then I'm going to want to install a game (dragon age, which takes up a lot of space - 20GB.)

What I'd like to do is have an external drive that is set up for the following:

1) partitioned for time machine to back up my main drive

2) I'd like another partition where I can install windows files - such as games - assuming performance isn't horrible (What format should I have this drive for windows7 stuff?) If this isn't too viable, I'll assign 43GB for windows on my ssd and then just possibly store more on the next partition:

3) I'd like another partition where I can store my mac project files and possibly some vmware images (ubuntu) etc. (I assume keep this partition in a mac journaled format?)

I assume I can do all this partitioning with Disk Utility? Is the setup a bad idea? Do I even need to bother partitioning separate for time machine and another mac partition? I'm pretty sure you can just have them side by side on one partition, but not sure what will happen as time machine keeps moving on - it'll start eating space that I want for manual storage of files?

Any other suggestions? (I'll be sure to get a firewire800 supported external drive. I'd love to have something like this 240GB SSD OWC Mercury On-The-Go Oxford Fire... (MS8USSD240) at OWC but ha, not at that price

07-10-2010, 01:13 PM

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07-11-2010, 10:18 AM

The partition scheme looks good. A few issues of concern might be to ensure you have enough partitioned space for your time machine backups. Another, as you mentioned, is the partition for windows games and other files. Really, larger games should be installed to an internal drive, but anything older or rather small should have no issues running from an external. Lastly, the format of the partition for your project files should really depend on whether you need to edit them from windows at all. The Journaled format from OSX is read-only from windows under bootcamp. Furthermore, I wouldn't attempt to run a VM from an external drive, due to performance being hampered.

But ultimately you need to decide what is right for you.