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How much space do you recommend on rMBP if you want to run Windows on a VM
- Thread starter galaksy
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It depends how much stuff you will put on Windows, I have 3 VMs running on my 256gb Mac Mini but they don't have many Apps, Programs or Games on. Altogether they take up about 60-70GB which is fine on 256GB. I'm getting a15" rMBP soon and it will have 512GB storage because I plan to put a lot more Apps on.
Both parallels and VM ware allow you to have a virtual disk that grows and shrinks depending on how big your windows install is. You don't have to allocate it any space per se, but you do have to have a bit of space to install the VM in the first place.
I have 256GB unfortunately.
If I use 60GB for Windows how much should I leave out for Mac and how much for empty space so that the SDD isn't too full at any time?
This. But bear in mind that growing VM storage dynamically is slightly less performant that reserving it all up-front. Normally the convenience of not allocating all of your storage (particularly on a laptop SSD) far outweighs the minor performance difference.
FYI, my Windows 7 Enterprise installation with some fairly heavyweight IDEs and Java middleware software uses about 60GB. The VM is based on a Bootcamp partition so you have to fix the partition size (& hence the VM disk size) when you install Bootcamp. I chose 80GB (close to 85 billion bytes on disk). You can use the free space in Bootcamp form Mac OS X if you have an NTFS extension such as Paragon or Tuxera. Next time I would choose 60-70GB for Windows 7 and try to keep the installation lean.