Dual Booting OSX Questions

[tobiasenstrom]

Hi,

Hope everyone is well.

I want to dual boot my Mac so I can use some older DJ controllers for Traktor Pro 2.

My current startup drive is 4tb in size and currently using just over 1tb.
Other than creating the partition and installing OSX 10.12.6 on the new partition, is there anything else I need to do?

Current system is:
Mac Pro Mid 2012
OSX 10.13.6

Thanks

 

[Apple_Robert]

As far as I can tell, you shouldn't need to do anything different.

 

[hobowankenobi]

Nope. As long as your Mac supports it, you can install as many OSes as you like.

Keep in mind two things:

1. Each OS needs breathing room for scratch disk, cache, and housekeeping. Don't make a boot partition too small...it can get sluggish and have various "out of space" issues.
2. The first partition will be the best performing on any HD. The outer tracks are the fastest, and the inner are slowest (drives fill from the outside, and work their way in).

So if one makes (in your case) the first partition like 3+ TB, then the second partition will start on the last, inner space of the drive. As it fills, it will get slower still. So...keep your most used OS on the first partition.

Another option: An external SSD would be fast and flexible. Just not as clean or rugged (unplugging a boot drive is problematic in a busy environment). Or...if you don't need so much space, swapping out the internal HD for an SSD?

 

[MacsolverUK]

Hi,

The last Mac OSX that can reside on a spinning hard disk is High Sierra with HFS+ format. Mojave and later must be on a SSD or NVMe drive APFS format. There are long technical discussions on line but this is the conclusion. OSX 10.13.6 supports booting from NVMe drives so long as the Mac Pro firmware is "140" or the final "144" version, which is updated with Mojave 10.14.6. However, to install the Mojave firmware, you need to have a Metal GPU such as a NVIDIA GTX680.

Speed comparison:
Spinning HDD 7200RPM = 120MB/s
Samsung 860Pro in PCIe2 SATA3 card = 550MB/s
Samsung 970Evo NVMe PCIe2 X4 card in slot 3 or 4 = 1450MB/s
2 x Samsung 970Evo NVMe on PCIe2 switched dual NVMe card in slot 2 = 2500MB/s.

Measured in My Mac Pro 2010 dual X5690 Mojave.

The Samsung drives have 5 year warranties. No consumer grade spinning HDDs have that.

 

[Fishrrman]

"The last Mac OSX that can reside on a spinning hard disk is High Sierra with HFS+ format. Mojave and later must be on a SSD or NVMe drive APFS format."

ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE.

I have Big Sur installed on a platter-based hard drive sitting in a USB3/SATA docking station.
(2018 Mac Mini w i7)

Boots and runs pretty good.
...Although every time I boot up, I have to use terminal to turn off spotlight, otherwise the drive "thrashes" quite a bit. Once spotlight is off, the drive "settles right down".

It actually runs surprisingly well, considering it's an old drive.

I also had Catalina running this way previously.
I didn't use either of these installs as my "daily driver" -- they are/were for experimental purposes only...

One other thing:
I did discover that Big Sur cannot be installed on a USB flashdrive (after several failed attempts). Regardless of the flash drive size, the installer just won't complete the job.

 

[tobiasenstrom]

Thanks for the replies.

So have got round to doing it today and it says I can only install on the drive that runs OS.
This was for El Capitan.

When I tried it for Sierra, the installer skips the 'destination select' option and says it will take up 16.5mb of space.

I created the partition in Disk Utility and used Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format

And for some unknown reason 663mb has been used on it already?