Few Questions about rMBP

[Hoolig4n]

I have been lurking these forums for the past 6 months, and finally decided I would post the question I haven't been able to find an answer to. I have ordered a BTO rMBP and just wanted some concrete answers before it arrives to start setting it up. Thanks in advance if anyone can help.

Background: I am a CompSci student who will be using some windows programs due to school, but I want to do everything I can to avoid it. For situations when I need to run windows I have decided to just use parallels because at most I would be using visual studio(no gaming). I will be using an external for my Virtual Machine(which i know u have to keep the 400mb part of parallels but u can put the rest on an external device).

Question : I pretty much want my mac to have no problem reading/writing files between the OS's so I am going to invest in Paragon NTFS. If i format my external hard drive NTFS will I be able to pretty much drag and drop files between my VM and OSx, and if not what are some options I would have to do so?

Sorry for the newb question lol this will be my first mac product other than an iPhone! Thanks!

 

[killmoms]

Does Parallels not mimic VMWare's use of MacFUSE to mount VM volumes directly? I don't think you need an external hard drive to drag and drop files between OS X and your VM anyway—you certainly don't in VMWare.

 

[Hoolig4n]

No idea man, I havent even gotten my first mac. I just know how i want it to handle my workload.

I need a VM to do .net programming when needed for school. I just want my home pc and my macbook pro to be able to both access files from my external.

 

[stevelam]

I wouldn't rely on any of those software solutions to make drives readable/writable for both OSes.

And sorry but running application dev environments in parallel/vm/virtual box etc is just a horrible idea.

 

[leenak]

You can easily drag and drop files directly with Parallels.

 

[Hoolig4n]

Can i boot camp off an external? If its horrible provide another alternative if you would, but with 256gb I don't want to partition.

 

[killmoms]

Not sure on booting a Windows install from an external drive, I've never tried. You can boot a Windows installer disc from a USB flash drive, so…*maybe? Not sure if there's some difference between the two.

Regardless, if you have two machines and want to share files via an external HDD, that's a different story. As long as you don't need to store individual files larger than 4GB, you could stick with FAT32. But, if you do, you'll probably want to stick with NTFS and use NTFS-3G or Paragon.

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And sorry but running application dev environments in parallel/vm/virtual box etc is just a horrible idea.

Why? It's not like IDEs require serious 3D performance, and VMs are pretty close to "native" performance for non-GPU-related tasks. Certainly close enough that their convenience beats dual-booting.

 

[covertsurfer]

And sorry but running application dev environments in parallel/vm/virtual box etc is just a horrible idea.

Why? If you've got 16GB on one of the rMBP's I'm pretty sure it will cope in fact even if you have 8GB I'm sure it will be fine.

 

[Hoolig4n]

Kind of what i figured as well. I got 16gb version and figured i could allocate 6 gigs to the VM when I set it up and be fine.