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What should the size of my partition(s) be?

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Kyler

Kyler

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Hello everyone! I am planning to triple boot Windows 10, Mac OSX Yosemite, and Arch Linux on my 240gb SSD.

I'm wondering how to set up the partitions so first things first:

1)What is the MINIMUM size a Windows OS partition should be? (And also the minimum/recommended for Mac OSX)
I've heard huge sizes and tiny ones. I am not looking for an extreme answer; "you need at least 180GB to run windows!" because that's BS...

I need to know the minimum and recommended *healthy (usable)* size for a Windows Partition because I'm planning to triple boot.

2) If I have 240 GB (225 GiB) and don't want to use beyond 80% space how should I partition it? So that I will have:
i) Windows 10 ii) Mac OSX Yosemite iii) Linux and iv) storage space: Games like Skyrim, maybe a program or two

I know it's up to me but I want some general guidelines.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks guys!
 
Kyler said:
Hello everyone! I am planning to triple boot Windows 10, Mac OSX Yosemite, and Arch Linux on my 240gb SSD.

I'm wondering how to set up the partitions so first things first:

1)What is the MINIMUM size a Windows OS partition should be? (And also the minimum/recommended for Mac OSX)
I've heard huge sizes and tiny ones. I am not looking for an extreme answer; "you need at least 180GB to run windows!" because that's BS...

I need to know the minimum and recommended *healthy (usable)* size for a Windows Partition because I'm planning to triple boot.

2) If I have 240 GB (225 GiB) and don't want to use beyond 80% space how should I partition it? So that I will have:
i) Windows 10 ii) Mac OSX Yosemite iii) Linux and iv) storage space: Games like Skyrim, maybe a program or two

I know it's up to me but I want some general guidelines.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks guys!
Click to expand...

Windows 10 will take about 40 GB of disk space for the OS and a couple of office apps. Adjust your size for that and how much space your games take.

OS X takes about 9 GB of disk space for the OS and some additional apps.

Linux will take different space depending on which distro you use - Red Hat or Debian will take up a good deal of space while Mint or Puppy Linux will be quite small.

Basis rule of thumb to go by is twice to 3 times the OS footprint for the OS partition size.
Really recommend you use separate drives - one for each OS.
 
Why do you recommend separate drives? (I can't do that anyways but am interested as to the thinking behind it)


Also the OS sizes you recommended are a lot tinier than most people suggest. Why does everyone suggest such big sizes?

(I agree with the windows; for Mac I think I need at least 20 according to most people because it's about 15gb after a fresh install)
 
Kyler said:
Why do you recommend separate drives? (I can't do that anyways but am interested as to the thinking behind it)


Also the OS sizes you recommended are a lot tinier than most people suggest. Why does everyone suggest such big sizes?

(I agree with the windows; for Mac I think I need at least 20 according to most people because it's about 15gb after a fresh install)
Click to expand...

With separate drives it is much easier to update/upgrade without taking the chance of messing up one of the other OS installations. Upgrading Windows has been known to remove the Chimera boot loader boot0 or boot0af from the MBR/PBR of the hard drive, forcing a re-install of the boot loader.

These are not recommended minimums - these numbers represent the actual physical space taken up by the OS on the drive. You need at least 3 times that number for the actual partition size.
 
I'm not using MBR/Chimera; I'm using Clover and GPT/EFI.
 
Going Bald said:
These are not recommended minimums - these numbers represent the actual physical space taken up by the OS on the drive. You need at least 3 times that number for the actual partition size.
Click to expand...
..That's all I want on the SSD--the actual OSs. Everything else would be going on my 3TB HDD.

Right now I'm looking at my very-much-used laptop and its C:\Windows is just 21 GB, but the C:\Users (just 1) is at 52GB (a lot of that will probably be managed better on new desktop). Do you think 80GB is good for a Windows Partition or no? And any idea why my Users is so High?
 
Kyler said:
..That's all I want on the SSD--the actual OSs. Everything else would be going on my 3TB HDD.

Right now I'm looking at my very-much-used laptop and its C:\Windows is just 21 GB, but the C:\Users (just 1) is at 52GB (a lot of that will probably be managed better on new desktop). Do you think 80GB is good for a Windows Partition or no? And any idea why my Users is so High?
Click to expand...

C:\Users contains all of the different users you have set up and for each user there is a My Documents/My Videos/My Pictures/My Music folder.

So how many pics/videos/mp3s and documents do you have in your folders?
 
Quite a few but otherwise my users would be around 45GB. Regardless of the /Users size does 80GB sound sufficient for a Windows partition?
 
Kyler said:
Quite a few but otherwise my users would be around 45GB. Regardless of the /Users size does 80GB sound sufficient for a Windows partition?
Click to expand...

80 is large enough if you are using a HDD for file storage and the SSD partition is for OS and apps only.
 
Will it only be enough to support the OS or will I be able to have, say, some store apps too. (Fable 4 is a store app and I think around 15GB)
 
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