Setup advice please.

[thenextbutton]

Hi Guys & Gals,

I am getting the mac mini with the 160gb drive, I will probably upgrade at a later date to a 500gb drive. How much space should I give the drive for OSX and Windows 7? I own Windows 7 and I would hate to lose it as I still need to write some applications in VB.Net. So what is a fair percentage between the 2 to share the space? I will probably only have windows 7 and vb.net on the windows partition.

I currently have 2 external USB2 400gb h/disks, I use 1 for documents and itunes and the other is a backup drive which clones the documents and itunes drive.

At the moment I have a PC setup with 2 users, Myself and the missus. Under my documents I have taken away the shortcuts to documents and replaced it with a shortcut to the USB drive with the documents folder on it. I have also done the same with My Music for both accounts. This allows us both to use the same documents & itunes library, anything she buys I can listen to and vice versa and we can see each other playlists. Will I still be able to achieve this in OSX? If so any tips on how to do this. I am not worried about keeping this in fat32 as I have a small 120gb drive that I will be dumping my Windows 7 files (vb.net files) on to.

I will be using 1 400gb usb drive to store itunes and documents on and I wanted to use the other 400gb drive as a time machine drive. Will time machine backup the files on my documents/itunes usb drive to the Time Machine drive or does it only regonise files that on the internal drive?


Thanks in advance for any advice/help.

[Bandit Bill]

I guess it really depends on how much you plan on using Windows and the size of the Windows apps you are going to install.

I set my Windows 7 partition to 10GB and didn't have an issue, but I used it so seldom that I eventually deleted it.

[thenextbutton]

On the Windows 7 I will be putting on firefox just for the occasional surfing use but also Visual Studio express.

I can not think of any apps that I will need to be running on Windows.

[Bandit Bill]

I think you should easily be fine with 10GB. You may want to wait for a few more replies before you commit to it.

[Smithcraft]

I would say 20GB, but that's just me. It's still small enough that you won't even miss it.

SC
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