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MacBook pro
- Thread starter ryanqc
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Yes, it's possible. I assume you're talking about replacing your internal HDD with a SSD, then using the HDD as an external drive, shared with Windows and Mac OS X.
If you're sharing the HDD across your network, you don't need to partition it or format it for Windows.
OS X Mountain Lion: Set up a Mac to share files with Windows users
Sorry I didn't clarify earlier
But what I wanted to do was since I'm adding an SSD to my cMBP 15" 2012 and partitioning sections for Windows and Mac, is it possible to allocate disk usage of my HDD (that will be in the optibay) for each operating system? Or is that even necessary?
On the SSD:
- 30-50gb for Windows
- The rest for Apple
HDD:
- 250gb for Windows
- 500gb for Mac
Sorry for such newb questions. Just made the switch over
But what I wanted to do was since I'm adding an SSD to my cMBP 15" 2012 and partitioning sections for Windows and Mac, is it possible to allocate disk usage of my HDD (that will be in the optibay) for each operating system? Or is that even necessary?
On the SSD:
- 30-50gb for Windows
- The rest for Apple
HDD:
- 250gb for Windows
- 500gb for Mac
Sorry for such newb questions. Just made the switch over
Are you talking about sharing with Windows that's installed on your Mac via Boot Camp? Or sharing with a separate computer running Windows?
There's no issue with this setup whether you're keeping one of the drives external or swapping out the internal optical drive. Any volume, no matter if it's a single partition on a drive or one of many partitions, can be used to boot either MacOS or Windows. You need to pay attention to what type of partition map you format the drive with. The MacOS will only boot from a GUID partition map, for example.
Personally I use VMWare virtual machines for Windows 7 and Server 2008R2 (and other OS's like Linux and Solaris). Unless you're gaming, it's a very good solution. I ran a presentation yesterday that had Mac desktops for Powerpoint, several web browser windows open to web services on some cloud orchestration software, and two different Windows VMs doing two different things. It was very slick to just be able to swipe between them on the trackpad.
I would consider it but I'm not to sure how it will work with FL Studio. How is it running a virtual system and downloading software? I haven't quite understood how that part works
It actually works very well. I have to do that all the time. You can set it up different ways, but the default setup is the VM runs on a private subnet with the Mac serving as a router. The VMs are NATed to the network the Mac is on.
For example, at the moment, my Mac is on 172.16.100.106, on a private subnet that sits behind my router. You no doubt have a similar setup, with your WiFi router setting up a LAN on something like 192.168.1.0. VMWare then establishes a 192.168.157.0/24 network internally and each of the VMs sits in that. My primary Windows 7 VM is at 192.168.157.130.
You don't need to understand networking to make this happen. All of this is under the covers. The software takes care of it. Just understand that the VMs get routed to your home or office LAN using NAT (network address translation) in exactly the same way your laptop uses NAT to get to the Internet. It's seamless. Any of the VMs can talk to each other on the 192.168.157.130 network and can talk to both the host Mac and any other devices on your LAN. A Windows VM can print to a printer on the LAN, for example.
Think of it like this: Each VM is a stand-alone computer. It shares resources with its host (the Mac) and it communicates over a network to both the Mac and the outside world.
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