Size of bootcamp partition

[komoornik]

Hello !

At the beginning I must say I'm a 100% Windows user now. It may change, but I still need Windows 7 on MBA for sure.

I'm going to buy 11.6"/4/128.

The question is, how much space lion takes after some time?

I was thinking about 20 GB for Lion, and 100 GB for Windows.

If I clean up the Lion install, it should be much less then 10 GB of space used, right ?

 

[falconxp]

I am also a bigtime Windows user. Just received my first Mac, an Air 11".

I use 50GB for Lion and the rest for Windows 7 Enterprise x64 so I have enough space for some Lion experimentation.

I use a Synology NAS for my media storage which is accessible from my win7 and Lion OS.

 

[ZBoater]

I started with 128GB for Lion and 128GB for Windows. I quickly figured out my Windows use will decrease dramatically, so I went 50GB Windowx and 200GB Lion. 50GB is enough for Windows, Office, Visio, Project, Quicken, and a couple extra apps. iTunes I moved to Lion.

 

[DustinT]

Parallels would be a good solution in some of the cases you are describing. If you haven't used a modern virtulization system you may be surprised at the performance and ease of use. Plus, no mucking about with partitions.

 

[Dwalls90]

Hello !

At the beginning I must say I'm a 100% Windows user now. It may change, but I still need Windows 7 on MBA for sure.

I'm going to buy 11.6"/4/128.

The question is, how much space lion takes after some time?

I was thinking about 20 GB for Lion, and 100 GB for Windows.

If I clean up the Lion install, it should be much less then 10 GB of space used, right ?

You must be dreaming. With Windows 7 and the required installations of software/OS (literally barebones) I had used up close to 30Gb. You will want at least 40Gb, but realistically at least 64Gb or so of a partition for bootcamp, IMO.

128Gb really isn't enough for bootcamp, go for 256Gb if you're set on the MBA.

 

[jim468]

You must be dreaming. With Windows 7 and the required installations of software/OS (literally barebones) I had used up close to 30Gb. You will want at least 40Gb, but realistically at least 64Gb or so of a partition for bootcamp, IMO.

128Gb really isn't enough for bootcamp, go for 256Gb if you're set on the MBA.

I agree. I was in a similar situation. Having used windows all my life I wanted to try out OS X. 128GB is enough if you are sure you will never migrate to OS X. In my case, I was not sure and so I got the 256 GB version.

This way I can try out OS X to a bigger extend by trying out various software, playing with VMs, etc. It's always better to have more space than less. I have given Lion 90 GB and the remaining to windows.

 

[MJL]

I've experimented a lot over the past few weeks. I also started out with 24 Gb for Snow Leopard but quickly discovered that I got errors about not enough space available. Happier with 32 Gb.

Similarly Windows 7 is requiring 32 Gb minimum too, it requires something like 15 Gb to install, then add some hibernation file and pagefile (add double the size of your Ram for that, so with 8 Gb Ram you need to add 16 Gb, or with 4 Gb ram add 8 Gb diskspace). And this is without any applications installed or data added: Office Home takes about 1.5 Gb, Outlook another 700+ MB......

I am 98% windows user (100% for work) and want to use OS X for music and photo's. In the end I have gone to using Windows on internal SSD and will be putting OS X Lion on external Raid-1 (FW 800 / 7200 rpm/ 16 Mb cache: Newertech Maximus Mini)