ssd+hdd configuration on mac mini

[frogprince12]

Hi all

I have a 256gb ssd and an original 500gb hdd for my mid 2011 mac mini, how can i install lion and win7 on ssd and use hdd for file management on both systems? thanks for help!

 

[frogprince12]

no one knows?

 

[dcoulson]

What do you mean by 'use hdd for filemanagement'?

 

[frogprince12]

basically what i meant is
i will install lion+win7 on 256gb ssd
and what i am struggling is how to use hdd for both lion and win7? is there anyway that i can divide hdd for half mac os and half ntfs?

 

[dcoulson]

Just use boot camp assistant to partition your HDD as you need. You can boot OS X off the SSD, and boot Windows off the HDD.

 

[Cmd-the-World]

basically what i meant is
i will install lion+win7 on 256gb ssd
and what i am struggling is how to use hdd for both lion and win7? is there anyway that i can divide hdd for half mac os and half ntfs?

Yes it is possible.

As far as I know you can partition the SSD for Windows and Mac OS X and the 500GB HDD you can keep it as one drive formatted as exFat and both Windows and Mac OS X can see it. I haven't tried it out my self so don't know if it is stable or not but some forum members are using this set up, search around. Obviously what ever set up you are going to use you need to always have a back up of your data.

 

[frogprince12]

Yes it is possible.

As far as I know you can partition the SSD for Windows and Mac OS X and the 500GB HDD you can keep it as one drive formatted as exFat and both Windows and Mac OS X can see it. I haven't tried it out my self so don't know if it is stable or not but some forum members are using this set up, search around. Obviously what ever set up you are going to use you need to always have a back up of your data.

Thanks for help, i've heard that we can partition our external hard disk into mac os and ntfs, say 250gb mac os extended and 250gb ntfs for a 500gb external hdd. Will it work for internal hdd?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Thanks for help, i've heard that we can partition our external hard disk into mac os and ntfs, say 250gb mac os extended and 250gb ntfs for a 500gb external hdd. Will it work for internal hdd?

Yes it will. In fact, if you are meaning the SSD/boot drive, just let the OS X installer do its thing normally, then run the Boot Camp app - it will repartition your primary drive for you.

 

[shortcut3d]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A406 Safari/7534.48.3)

I can attest to exFAT being stable. I write compressed video to exFAT formatted SSDs.

 

[shortcut3d]

I just tried out MacDrive Pro 9 and its awesome with the LaCie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk. I can use the LaCie under windows using the Mac RAID 0 and seamlessly switch between OSX. This makes for a decently fast scratch disk in Windows 7 and Time Machine drive.