I just ordered a new macbook pro, and I want to avoid the same hard drive sluggishness and disorganization that has come after years of adding random extensions and junk to my current macbook. I've been doing some research on how to keep the hard drive running in ship-shape, and I've come up with this general partition scheme for a 500gig hard drive. If this won't work (which wouldn't surprise me) I'm not super dedicated to any particular scheme.
5 gigabytes dedicated OS X swapfile (Not sure about this one, read that it helped speed. According to Matt Wolanski's formula, this should be about right. HFS+)
150 gigabytes for windows (games mostly. NTFS, I assume)
200 gigs for normal OS X (applications, the OS itself, etc. HFS+)
145 gigs for large files (storing large downloads, P2P, movies, music etc. here should help speed things along. This would be formatted HFS+ probably. Maybe shared with windows?)
I would think that disk utility could handle all of the HFS+ partitions, and boot camp could handle the NTFS partition for windows 7. The problem is, I'm not very good with this kind of stuff, I've only ever done partitions in VMs, and I didn't really know what I was doing.
Do you all have any advice on which order I should do this, which tools I should use etc? I really have no idea what could cause this to go wrong, and I'm one of those people who, if they break something, will stay up for the next 20 hours trying to fix it, so I want to get this right the first time.
Thanks for the help!
Will
5 gigabytes dedicated OS X swapfile (Not sure about this one, read that it helped speed. According to Matt Wolanski's formula, this should be about right. HFS+)
150 gigabytes for windows (games mostly. NTFS, I assume)
200 gigs for normal OS X (applications, the OS itself, etc. HFS+)
145 gigs for large files (storing large downloads, P2P, movies, music etc. here should help speed things along. This would be formatted HFS+ probably. Maybe shared with windows?)
I would think that disk utility could handle all of the HFS+ partitions, and boot camp could handle the NTFS partition for windows 7. The problem is, I'm not very good with this kind of stuff, I've only ever done partitions in VMs, and I didn't really know what I was doing.
Do you all have any advice on which order I should do this, which tools I should use etc? I really have no idea what could cause this to go wrong, and I'm one of those people who, if they break something, will stay up for the next 20 hours trying to fix it, so I want to get this right the first time.
Thanks for the help!
Will