How much space is needed for duel booting?

[Meinlsync]

Hi,

I'm in the process of buying all the parts for a pretty kickass Hackintosh that I want to duel boot for gaming on windows. All the major parts have been purchased, but coming to the storage my funds are beginning to dwindle slightly. I have two 3.5" 500GB HDDs already to use as storage drives, and my original plan was to buy two 240GB Crucial M500 SSDs as boot drives. I already have a M500 in my Macbook with my home folder saved on a secondary (optibay mounted) 500gb drive. I'm planning to do the same with this build but it looks like I'll only be able to stretch to one M500. The question is home much space do need for a mac boot drive (considering home folder is stored on a separate drive) and for a windows 8.1 boot drive (with users files and program files on a separate drive). Would 120GB each be enough (M500 partitioned in half) or is it really necessary to have the SSD for the gaming rig at all? (I can still do two drives for the windows, the 500GB 3.5" and laptop 320GB or 160GB HDDs).

Thanks

PS; not that it should matter, but I'll be installing 10.9 Mavericks.

 

[mucksavage]

Bare bones mavericks install is just south of 8 gigs, bare bones windows 8.1 install is about 17 gigs (if you turn off the hibernation files of each). In reality, if they are just boot drives, you don't need a ton of space. But installing windows and OSX on the same drive is tricky and can be frustrating, so if you had the opportunity, I would use separate drives for each.

If you're just using windows for games, I would just leave the SSD for OSX and install windows on another drive.

 

[Meinlsync]

Thanks for the quick reply, thinking about it I don't know why I am questioning it as I see load of builds with 120 or less boot drives, hell my MacBook only came with a 160 that lasted me a while.

I'm still keen on partitioning the SSD and booting both OS's onto the same drive. Could you elaborate on what makes it tricky or some of the problems it causes? I read about how after installing OSX you should remove the drive before installing Windows, is this the only problem or are there other hiccups?

 

[mucksavage]

http://www.tonymacx86.com/multi-booting/96000-guide-dual-booting-mountain-lion-windows-8-a.html

 

[Meinlsync]

Again, thanks for the reply. I read though some of that after my first reply to you, looked like it was more hassle than it was worth. I've now decided to use a San Disk Extreme 120GB for windows, get a San Disk Ultra 120GB for my Macbook (as its only SATA II) and use my current M500 for OSX on my Hackintosh. Looking forward to the build.

 

[zaptoons]

120gb is plenty for an OSX install. Even with apps installed it'll only use around 20GB. I prefer a system with a 128GB ssd as system drive/applications and scratch disk for apps like Photoshop. Then larger hard drive(s) (2 or 3TB) for file storage. I also clone my main OSX install to yet another drive as a system failsafe, and keep incremental clone images of the system backed up on larger storage drives.

Windows always on its own hard drive. And yes, always installed with other drives removed, especially OSX. Keeps Windows self-contained to a single hard drive as it should be and keeps it from wrecking the bootloader.

Anyway, good luck with your build.