Air or Pro for Parallels, HD Space

[chris654]

I'm getting a mac and need to be able to run virtual machines in parallels smoothly without running out of hard drive space. I'll be running Win2008R2 + Win 7 at the same time. I'll also have a VM for Ubuntu. First how well does the Air 1.8mhz 8gigs run the first 2 o/s? How much hard drive space is typical for running these. I'm mainly loading just the o/s. I didn't know if 128gig is adequate or if I'm going to quickly fill up half the drive. The air is pretty pricey with the 256gig drive so am leaning towards the 13" pro with its 500gig drive. The person at the apple store recommended the pro as the Air will be running the fan a lot.

Thanks,
Chris

 

[luketheduke]

I have a late 2011 MacBook Air which has been my main computer since I bought it, it runs everything I ask it to.

I run 10.8 and Win 8 all the time with Parallels 8, I've also used a couple of linux VMs at the same time too. I also run games occasionally on the Windows one with the others running with no performance issues.

I only got the 128GB 13" Air 'cos I got sick of waiting for the 4GB/128GB 11" back when I was after one. I have no storage issues at all and have 10-15GB of free space in OS X and about 20GB on Windows. The Linux VMs are only a few gigabytes total.

There's a bunch of games and programs on Windows and heaps of apps and documents, music etc on OS X. I have to complaints or need more storage, I could clean heaps of old stuff out too.

I usually move things like movies, never listened to music and all the stuff I want to keep but not use, on a file server.

Hope that helped a bit.

 

[micrors4racer]

I have an air with 128gb and running VMs on it isn't so nice. Speedwise its awesome but with only 128 gb it is severely lacking if you want to use OSX like normal with your music and stuff on it and also run your other VMs like you would a stand alone computer with their respective apps and internal files.

Ram is also and issue since the air maxes out at 8gb while the pro can go up to 32.

 

[robvas]

If you get the Pro, make sure you get an SSD - running VM's on a platter drive can be frustrating when they both use the disk.

 

[wolfpuppies3]

I use Parallels all the time on my MBPro 500 GB. I had the 7200 RPM HDD and recently replaced it with a 505 GB SSD for it's speed (3x faster) but the HDD worked fine running Windows 7 and OS X simultaneously.

 

[yinz]

When I used to run on Windows XP, I thought 120 GB was a lot. Now that I've started to use the MBA, I've realized that for MacBooks, 128 is probably not enough. I'm using 256 and I'm already at 80 GB. I only have around 8 apps that I installed and less than 10 movies on my Hard Drive. The system and its functions really takes up a lot of the space, so I don't think 128 would be enough unless you have a separate storage drive...

 

[monkeybagel]

I had a 2011 Air with 4GB/256, and it ran Windows Server 2003 VMs (multiple ones) rather quickly (although these are less resouce intensive than 2008), and I was very pleased with it. I sold the machine however because it could not be expanded. With 8GB and 256SSD, I think you would be fine machine.

The Page Outs are much less apparent on an SSD machine compared to an HD machine.

 

[tsboy69]

I'm getting a mac and need to be able to run virtual machines in parallels smoothly without running out of hard drive space. I'll be running Win2008R2 + Win 7 at the same time. I'll also have a VM for Ubuntu. First how well does the Air 1.8mhz 8gigs run the first 2 o/s? How much hard drive space is typical for running these. I'm mainly loading just the o/s. I didn't know if 128gig is adequate or if I'm going to quickly fill up half the drive. The air is pretty pricey with the 256gig drive so am leaning towards the 13" pro with its 500gig drive. The person at the apple store recommended the pro as the Air will be running the fan a lot.

Thanks,
Chris

Have a mid-2012 MBA with 256. Running OEM Windows 7, Parallels 7 and Office 2003. No slowdown for me, it bounces from OS to Windows with a click. It's a winner IMHO.