Mac Partitioning

[Charolotte Caxton]

Hello! I am in need of technical assistance. I have a Mac and I am installing windows on it so that I can download the Dragon viewer. It wants me to choose a partition size but I’m not entirely sure which size to choose. Does it matter since SL is not actually installed into my computer? Or does it matter? From what I’ve been able to gather online, it seems like it’s a matter of storage space. Do I need storage space to run SL optimally? Any help would be appreciated. Love, me.

[Lindal Kidd]

SL itself won't use all THAT much storage space. Its cache size can be fairly large, but you can adjust this.

My computer is Windows only. My Windows 10 installation, plus a LOT of programs, is taking up about 200 GB of my 1 TB solid state drive. The Windows folder itself is about 35 GB, and the Users folder, an important one for Windows, is about another 25 GB.  By comparison, my SL cache folders are less than 4 GB.

What size is your primary drive, and how much free space do you have?

[Charolotte Caxton]

17 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

SL itself won't use all THAT much storage space. Its cache size can be fairly large, but you can adjust this.

My computer is Windows only. My Windows 10 installation, plus a LOT of programs, is taking up about 200 GB of my 1 TB solid state drive. The Windows folder itself is about 35 GB, and the Users folder, an important one for Windows, is about another 25 GB.  By comparison, my SL cache folders are less than 4 GB.

What size is your primary drive, and how much free space do you have?

Thank you. I have two hard drives it appears, one is two terabytes with 1.94 terabytes available, the other is only 120.88 gigabytes. I’m not sure why there are two but that’s what I’m seeing. From what you’ve described, it appears I have plenty of space. Thank you for your help.

[Lindal Kidd]

That sounds like you have one solid state drive (SSD), the small one, and one spinning hard drive for data storage. Your MacOS is probably on the smaller (and much faster) SSD.  I would worry that there isn't enough space on the SSD to add Windows there as well, so you will probably make a partition on your larger drive and put Windows, and any Windows programs, there.

Another option would be to upgrade the SSD to a larger one. You can get 512 GB SSDs for $50 to $60.  However, transferring everything over to a new drive can be tricky, and I have zero idea of how to do it on a Mac. If you do this sort of upgrade, take it in to your nearest shop for assistance.

Or maybe I am completely wrong, and there is only one physical hard drive, but two partitions on it. A partition will appear as a hard drive, even though it's really only a roped-off section of a drive. For example, Windows does this when you install it, creating a main partition and a small partition it uses for recovery in the case of major disasters.

[Lyssa Greymoon]

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Edited December 15, 2021 by Lyssa Greymoon

[Madelaine McMasters]

It sounds like you have a Fusion Drive, which is a combination of SSD (128GB in your case) and rotating drive (2TB in your case) that caches the OS and frequently used programs/data in the SSD. You can't treat them as separate things.

If you're going to run BootCamp to install Windows, macOS will only be able to read files in the Windows NTFS partition, so you can't locate the SL cache there. BootCamp installs a HFS+ driver, so Windows will be able to read/write the macOS partition. You could also move the SL cache to an external SSD formatted as FAT32, which is accessible to both operating systems.

All that said, I'm not sure if the macOS and Windows cache file formats and layouts are identical, so I suppose there's a possibility you can't share a single cache or settings folder. The last Windows install I did was for WinXP and that required 5GB minimum. I did a quick check and it seems Win11 wants 64GB minimum. I'll guess that the SL viewer, absent caches, can live in 1GB.