Dual-Booting Win7 and OS X - Bare Minumum Hard Drive Requirement?

Question

I'm thinking of swapping out the stock hard drive in my MBP 13" for an SSD. The problem of course related to the still-shocking prices of the 256GB SSDs so I was looking at a 64GB one, possibly as a drive-only upgrade using the OWC Datadoubler so I can use the existing drive for data and put OSes and apps on the SSD.

My question is, is this going to be enough to do full installs of OS X AND Windows 7? Or should I put my techno-lust/need-for-speed on a back-burner until the price comes down?

FYI I'm doing .Net and Objective-C development on Windows and OS X respectively. My current (Bootcamp) setup isn't especially slow, but since maxing out the memory I've realised the HD is now the only bottleneck.

Answer 1

The other answers are right: you can dual boot OSX and Win7 with a 64GB SSD.

But you also mention .NET development on Windows. You may need to throw something like 8GB for development tools (VS2010, SQL Server, etc). I dont' really know how many space you will need for Objective-C dev tools, but I'm doing an educated guess that you will need an extra 10GB, giving you a total of 40GB in your initial setup.

It is a good practice leaving a few GB's of free space in the SSD, since it may help you regarding TRIM and GC.

All that said, I think you are pretty close to the limit here. I would recommend going for a 80GB or 20-128GB SSD.

Intel released a model from its X25-M G2 SSD drives, with 120GB. I do have a desktop machine with an 80GB Intel X25-M SSD + 1TB HDD, and I'm waiting for my 120GB X25-M to arrive. I will have it on my notebook too (a VAIO VGN-Z), and for my use case (.NET and Android development), even 80GB seemed a little too small.

Answer 2

Bare minimum for OSX is 8.12GB, and for Windows 7 its 20GB (16GB for x86)

So you should be fine but don't forget these sizes will grow through use.