Advice on dual booting Mavericks and Windows 8.1

[lentife]

Hi everyone, I am very excited about my upcoming hackintosh build and I am trying to figure out the best setup for dual booting OS X 10.9 and Windows 8.1 Pro Student. This is going to be my first hackintosh and I have little experience - I will procede exactly as explained in the guides on this forum. The build parts will arrive sometime next week, so I have plenty of time to think about the best way to do this.

My build: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H - i5 4570 - GeForce GTX 760 - 8GB DDR3
HDD1: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB
HDD2: Seagate 2TB ST2000DM001

I will use OS X primarily and Windows just for gaming purposes, so my initial idea was to run OS X on SSD and Windows on a Seagate partition (1TB, the other 1TB for OS X Storage). According to [Guide] Dual Booting Mountain Lion and Windows 8 it is recommended to dual boot on two different drives. Now, I suppose it won't make a difference if the first OS is on SSD and the second one on the Seagate drive, does it?

An alternative would be splitting the SSD in two 60GB partitions and install both OS' on the SSD. I wonder if 60GB are enough for that, since I intend to keep my user / app data files on the SSD drive. In this case I would start with partition 1 (Windows), after that is fully working continue with partition 2 (OS X) - as explained in the aforementioned guide.

What method would you suggest to a beginner? A) OS X on SSD 120GB and Windows on 1TB HDD Partition
B) Windows 60GB SSD (1st partition), OS X 60 GB SSD (2nd partition).

Thank you very much in advance, I really appreciate your advice!

 

[Going Bald]

What method would you suggest to a beginner? A) OS X on SSD 120GB and Windows on 1TB HDD Partition
B) Windows 60GB SSD (1st partition), OS X 60 GB SSD (2nd partition).

Thank you very much in advance, I really appreciate your advice!

Go with A. If the HDD is a 2TB and your files are all less than 4Gb in size and you would like to be able to access them from both OS's, suggest you format the second 1Tb partition MSDOS FAT (FAT 32).

 

[lentife]

Thanks a lot for the quick reply! I will go with A, then. I guess a triple partition of the 2TB drive could come in handy?
Partition 1) Windows OS 1TB
Partition 2) MSDOS FAT (FAT 32) Exchange drive for both OS. 50 GB
Partition 3) Mac OS Extended (Journaled) 950GB

 

[Going Bald]

Thanks a lot for the quick reply! I will go with A, then. I guess a triple partition of the 2TB drive could come in handy?
Partition 1) Windows OS 1TB
Partition 2) MSDOS FAT (FAT 32) Exchange drive for both OS. 50 GB
Partition 3) Mac OS Extended (Journaled) 950GB

That would work, yes.