Win 10, minimum space for general use?

[MrMister111]

I’ve found my old Windows license that had on my iMac, pretty certain it’s Win 10 as I did the free upgrade a few years ago.

I now have a MBP 2019 with 256Gb on, and wondering what’s minimum Win 10 needs. Don’t use it much tbh, but sometimes handy. Won’t have Office installed on it, I’d use boot camp as well.

Just not sure if worth it pinching too much of the limited space on my MBP.

Is it easy if needed to increase the space it has later on?

Thanks

 

[Shirasaki]

Windows 10 alone would be good to have 30GB, give or take a few GB
based on my experience.

As for the space, it is not easy to expand the space after windows is installed via bootcamp. Paragon’s CamptuneX could do the job but support to Catalina is unclear.

 

[MrMister111]

Seems decent. Happy to give up 50Gb for those times maybe need but I’ve found this on Apple which doesn’t sound good. So do I need 128Gb free?

“The latest macOS updates, which can include updates to Boot Camp Assistant. You will use Boot Camp Assistant to install Windows 10.
64GB or more free storage space on your Mac startup disk:
Your Mac can have as little as 64GB of free storage space, but at least 128GB of free storage space provides the best experience. Automatic Windows updates require that much space or more.”

Install Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp Assistant – Apple Support (UK)

Find out how to install Windows 10 on your Mac with Boot Camp.

support.apple.com

 

[Shirasaki]

Nah. Apple advice regarding windows disk space usage is relatively inaccurate at best, misleading at worst. If you are not sure how windows 10 will occupy spaces, you can download a virtualbox and install windows 10 inside it with 30GB of space and see how it performs.

Unless bootcamp assistant literally complain insufficient space and stops you from continuing to install Windows 10, ignore that “requirement”.

 

[MrMister111]

Ok thanks, so you think 50Gb will be enough for Win 10, a few small apps etc and space to “breath”

Maybe worth it then. Unless install on a USB pen and run from there if that’s possible and viable?

128Gb USB-C pens are cheap so plenty space, not sure on speed it would run from it though?

 

[Shirasaki]

Yes. Windows 10 itself is not that “space demanding”

Bootcamp from USB is something that I have heard possible but never bother giving it a shot cause I have a Windows PC. You can search for it, but the performance will suffer a bit, even under USB-C connection.

 

[Altemose]

Windows 10 is not overly space demanding, however I would advocate for at least 64 GB to allow space for updates (particularly version updates) and applications. Bear in mind, that Windows will occupy an identical amount of storage to your RAM amount for hibernation. In essence, a system with 16 GB of RAM will have an additional 16 GB of storage space allocated to it.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

The minimum normally usable Windows 10 installation is probably around 21-22 GB.

I've been running Windows 10 Professional on a VirtualBox VM for several years. If I purge everything (Windows Update backups, software downloads, caches, logs, etc.) and compact the whole VM drive, it ends up being 25-26 GB. That's with MS Office and a few other applications, let's say 2-3 GB.

If I recall correctly, I originally set the VirtualBox VM up as a fixed 30 GB VM drive, but it eventually turned out that it wasn't enough for major OS upgrades so I switched to an expandable drive image and kept on increasing it until I reached about a 45 GB drive image size.

More recently I also have another Windows instance in the house: a cheapass $170 Wintel box running Windows 10 Home. The 64 GB system boot SSD does not have MS Office but it does have a few multimedia applications plus the trading tool from my brokerage. Let's say 1 GB. All of my media content is on an external hard drive.

At this very moment that system is using 21.7 GB of space and I haven't done a recent purge of caches, etc.

I've had a cloud-hosted Windows VM a couple of times in the past few years at Amazon AWS. Each time, the VMs were about 25-30 GB before I started adding other executables. Of course, those were never Home tier Windows installations, they were usually Server.