Howdy! I just received my new 27" iMac, shipped via OWC for some extra goodies 
- so now it's at 16GB RAM, 480GB SSD, and a 3TB HDD. I'm new to the Apple world, so I thought I needed to start small ... ;-)
I plan to use the system mostly as a Mac OS X system, but will need access to Windows for some stuff, like OneNote, specialty apps like Mapsource, etc. and of course games. I broke the SSD up into a 320GB Mac partition, and a 160GB Windows Boot Camp partition, and so far everything is working nicely. I am using the newest version of Parallels (7, I think) to get another "view" on the Boot Camp partition when that is more convenient than re-booting. So far, so good.
Now I'm trying to figure out how to use the 3TB HDD, as I'm ready to a) start moving over all my data to the new machine (from a set of PCs, currently), and b) getting a backup scheme in place.
My current thinking is to divvy that into 1TB or so of partition exclusively for Time Machine, and then 2TB for shared data partition for the two OS's. Then I could put "shareables" there ... maybe music, certainly pics, etc. Obviously the TM partition has to be HFS+ so that's easy. For the shared data partition, after reading around these forums and the net, I'm kinda sorta thinking about formatting as exFAT ... I just like the idea of not needing 3rd party software to do my file access, makes me ... nervous.
So the questions are I guess 1) does this divvy approach seem sane, and 2) is this a gross mis-use of what exFAT is for? Are there characteristics it exhibits which make it inappropriate for this usage?
Oh, and bonus question - will TM see "into" an exFAT partition and back it up, or are the to-be-backed-up partitions themselves also supposed to be HFS+?
Thanks in advance!
-Jeff
- so now it's at 16GB RAM, 480GB SSD, and a 3TB HDD. I'm new to the Apple world, so I thought I needed to start small ... ;-)I plan to use the system mostly as a Mac OS X system, but will need access to Windows for some stuff, like OneNote, specialty apps like Mapsource, etc. and of course games. I broke the SSD up into a 320GB Mac partition, and a 160GB Windows Boot Camp partition, and so far everything is working nicely. I am using the newest version of Parallels (7, I think) to get another "view" on the Boot Camp partition when that is more convenient than re-booting. So far, so good.
Now I'm trying to figure out how to use the 3TB HDD, as I'm ready to a) start moving over all my data to the new machine (from a set of PCs, currently), and b) getting a backup scheme in place.
My current thinking is to divvy that into 1TB or so of partition exclusively for Time Machine, and then 2TB for shared data partition for the two OS's. Then I could put "shareables" there ... maybe music, certainly pics, etc. Obviously the TM partition has to be HFS+ so that's easy. For the shared data partition, after reading around these forums and the net, I'm kinda sorta thinking about formatting as exFAT ... I just like the idea of not needing 3rd party software to do my file access, makes me ... nervous.
So the questions are I guess 1) does this divvy approach seem sane, and 2) is this a gross mis-use of what exFAT is for? Are there characteristics it exhibits which make it inappropriate for this usage?
Oh, and bonus question - will TM see "into" an exFAT partition and back it up, or are the to-be-backed-up partitions themselves also supposed to be HFS+?
Thanks in advance!
-Jeff