[fishguy]

I am about to upgrade to a 27" imac and would like to run both OSX and windows 7 periodically. If I install 2 ssd in the imac can I use 1 large drive (a 3rd drive - hd) as the "data" drive for both OSX and windows? I was going to use an external drive for data. For now a firewire 800 (already have one) and later move to a thunderbolt drive when more options are available. Will there be any issues with using a common drive for OSX and Windows files?

I was going to just use bootcamp rather than run parallels or something similar. I don't need to go back and forth between OSs much. Any other recommendations as to the physical set up?

Thanks

[angelmb]

So you will have:

- two internal hard disks, one for each operating system.
- an unique external hard disk for data. This disk should be accessible from either OS.

You could format the external hard disk as NTFS (Windows native filesystem) and use some software like Paragon NTFS for Mac, which is a driver that lets you not only read but write data on Windows NTFS formatted hard disks. I've been running it for a while and it is safe, e.g. files and folders retain color-code labels and Spotlight Comments.
There are free alternatives to Paragon NTFS for Mac but I am not sure those have the same functionality.

You could go the opposite way and format the external hard disk as Mac instead of NTFS, and then, run some software like MacDrive under Windows to read and write to the external Mac formatted hard drive. But I have no experience with it whatsoever and in all honest, I much prefer the Mac having the ability to get full access to the Windows hard disks and not the other way.

Please note that under Boot Camp you should be able to read Mac formatted hard disks without the need of any 3rd party software as Boot Camp itself includes such ability. You are not going to be able to write to Mac formatted hard disks without the help of 3rd party software like the aforementioned MacDrive, though.

As for the physical set up… you should add a fourth drive just for backups.

[Athens]

My setup has a 128GB SSD into my Macbook Pro split 50/50 for Windows 7 and Lion and a eSATA 2GB drive also split 50/50 in HFS+ and NTFS. Windows 7 uses the NTFS drive for data, backups big programs that take up a lot of space. My HFS+ drive is used by time machine and general storage as well.

Because the Windows side can read and write to HFS+ I'm using that drive/partition for most of my storage.

[P]

Note that larger SSDs are faster on some specifications, so it would be better to have one SSD and partition it than to have two.

[fishguy]

Thanks. Very helpful. If I ust something like paragon ntfs then time machine will back up the ntfs drive? Are there any performance issues with osx when using an ntfs data drive to store media?

[hayesk]

I think Time Machine will back it up, but I'm not sure. I think only the Time Machine drive itself has to be HFS+. Rather than Time Machine, you could use something like Chronosync instead.