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Installing Parallels on a relatively small SSD

DeputyRob

DeputyRob

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 2, 2009
25
0
Upper Midwest
Hi all:

I have a 2.8GHz i7 27" iMac with a 120GB Mercury Extreme SSD as a boot drive; the hard drive is 1TB that's OEM. I'm currently running Mac 10.9 DP3.

The question is this: I'm considering adding Parallels 8 but don't know the best way to partition the various drives. Ideally, I'd like both OS X and Windows 7 to use the speed of the SSD (v. the hard drive) but I don't know if there's enough room to do so. After OS X 10.9 DP3 was installed and other software was added, the SSD has 94GB left. Is that enough to add Parallels 8 and Windows 7 to run off the SSD? Obviously, I'd move pictures, video, and other "non-essentials" to the hard drive where SSD isn't needed.

Does anyone have experience doing this?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
 
ayeying

ayeying

macrumors 601
Dec 5, 2007
4,547
13
Yay Area, CA
You can run Parallels off of any size drive if you're not booting off the boot camp partition. If you're just using it as a virtual machine, it does not even partition your drive.
 
ZBoater

ZBoater

macrumors G3
Jul 2, 2007
8,497
1,322
Sunny Florida
You need to decide whether you want to install Windows in a bootcamp partition, or if you want to use it as a virtual machine only.

I installed Windows in a bootcamp partition, so I have the choice of booting natively into Windows if I choose, OR I can boot into OS X and run that bootcamp copy of Windows as a VM inside OS X.

Having the choice lets you boot natively if you are running a game or other CPU/graphic intensive app where you need the best possible performance.

If you are not running those kind of apps (for example, you run Windows just to run the Windows version of MS Office, Quicken for Windows, etc.), then a VM would be just fine and you don't need to install Windows in a bootcamp partition.

You can install Parallels and Windows VM in your SSD and it would run great.

If you choose to run Windows in a bootcamp partition, you will need about 20GB. I've seen some posts of people being able to reduce the size of their Windows directory to under 11GB, but with some modifications. Plan on giving up 20-40GB of your drive for a bootcamp partition.

Is it worth it? It all depends on you and your use of Windows.

Good luck.
 
DeputyRob

DeputyRob

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 2, 2009
25
0
Upper Midwest
I'm studying for my CCNA exam and some of the labs found in the study guide only run on x86 machines. I'm simply going to create a Windows 7 VW and run the labs in the background.

From what you're saying, it sounds like this should be relatively easy.

Thanks for your assistance.
 
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