Bootcamp on external media
I have a new MBA (i7 2ghz, 8gb RAM, 512GB SSD) arriving soon, having decided to downgrade (cpu speed, disk storage & RAM) from my MBP (15", 16gb RAM, 256gb SSD main drive & 750gb HD in DVD Bay).
I use a lot of Windows Fusion VM's and after doing some testing I have discovered that I get faster read and write speeds when the VM is on an external drive connected via USB 3. Thats on a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 320gb drive and a G-Tech Gdrive Mini 1tb 7200rpm. I currently have the VM's on the internal 750gb HD, so clearly the SATA2 pipe to the DVD bay is the problem. Obviously the VM's would be best located on the main SSD drive, but most of them are too big to be resident there for long. So anyway, soon I will just have the internal 512gb SSD on the MBA.
I have two types of Windows usage.
- Windows VM's for testing SQL Server stuff, usually 75gb plus in size
- Production VM's configured for client corporate domain work - these tend to be smaller in size as SQL databases are held on the corporate servers
I will probably locate the smaller production VM's on the main SSD drive.
The testing VM's could now reside permanently on the external USB 3 drive as I have established this is faster than my current deployment. There are now some reasonably priced USB 3 & Thunderbolt disks and I am very tempted by the Lacie Rugged 256gb SSD USB 3 (
http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10599). The SSD would eliminate any performance concerns.
However, as you want, it might be useful to be able to boot the MBA into Windows but I dont want to have the Bootcamp partition wasting space on the MBA. I appreciate you want to use the SD slot and avoid the need for an external drive, but many of them are very small fomr factor and bus powered these days.
My idea for that would be to
- from factory condition OS X minimally configure the system
- apply bootcamp with a very large partition (minimal for OS X)
- create a Windows environment
- clone this to an external USB3 or Thunderbolt drive (using CCC)
- boot the MBP from the external drive clone and load the Windows Bootcamp system
- alter settings for the clone so that it boots into Windows by default
I think from reading up on this a bit and having a go at creating bootcamp on an external drive directly (which failed), I think this might be your best option as I dont think you will get Bootcamp happening on your SD card. However, you might like to try this process onto the SD card rather than an external disk.
As you already have your setup fully configured, you could try cloning the system onto the SD card, ensuring that you uncheck most of the OS X stuff for the clone process.
