Optimal Hard Drive Setup - Hackintosh + Win10 + Linux(Maybe?)

[HawkinsonB]

Hello all,

 

A quick search has yielded me conflicting results on a solid way to do what i'm about to ask. Here's my current setup:

 

Windows 10 Machine, 240gb SSD(win10 + creative suite and common utility apps), 1tb WD Black(houses my steam games), 4tb Seagate(the drive in question: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00B99JU4S?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00)

 

Alright! This weekend I have another 240gb SSD coming, i'll be attempting to install MacOSX El Capitan to it(looks like my parts will work for this build, xeon 1241v3, gtx 970, compatable motherboard listed by TomsHardware, ram/psu/hds dont matter to much as long as they work with the mobo). There is a possibility that i'll be getting a 120gb SSD to install kaliLinux on this as well(although i may just VM this in the MacOSX machine). 

 

Now for the question! How can I reformat my seagate 4tb drive to act like a mass storage device between the two? I won't be installing apps on it at all because the 240gb SSD will be plenty for the applications i want to be using on MacOSX (Xcode[main reason],Photoshop,etc - just found it to be a lot more stable than on win10). I've read into the FAT32 format but heard there was limiting file sizes to 4gb, that is a no go. I've heard about exFAT however there seems to be a reliability issue here. Are there more options? Is NFTS available to read/write on MacOSX?

 

Thanks guys!

Brandon

[maxtch]

If you get Hackintosh please set up Fusion Drive. Windows and Linux can stay in a virtual machine.

[HawkinsonB]

Just now, maxtch said:

If you get Hackintosh please set up Fusion Drive. Windows and Linux can stay in a virtual machine.

I'll be dual booting for 2 reasons. 1) The things I use on windows will need all available resources to preform efficiently, VMs while nice won't let me use all my hardware to capacity, Linux will definitely consider VM. 2) I already have win10 set up and installed, i want to add MaxOSX to the mix and not rework my whole system for it!

 

Thanks for the tip!

[maxtch]

Just now, HawkinsonB said:

I'll be dual booting for 2 reasons. 1) The things I use on windows will need all available resources to preform efficiently, VMs while nice won't let me use all my hardware to capacity, Linux will definitely consider VM. 2) I already have win10 set up and installed, i want to add MaxOSX to the mix and not rework my whole system for it!

 

Thanks for the tip!

You will HAVE to wipe everything to install Hackintosh anyway (unless you are willing to tackle all the Clover complexities) so might as well just start fresh. And unless you need some very specific features I don't think virtualization will hurt anything. And if you game you can try get OS X version of your games.

[HawkinsonB]

Just now, maxtch said:

You will HAVE to wipe everything to install Hackintosh anyway (unless you are willing to tackle all the Clover complexities) so might as well just start fresh. And unless you need some very specific features I don't think virtualization will hurt anything. And if you game you can try get OS X version of your games.

That's what the extra 240gb SSD is for, boot and install OSX directly to the new 240gb SSD, unless i'm completely wrong in my reasoning here. 

[maxtch]

1 minute ago, HawkinsonB said:

That's what the extra 240gb SSD is for, boot and install OSX directly to the new 240gb SSD, unless i'm completely wrong in my reasoning here. 

OS X will not work well with small storage unless you do absolutely minimal with it. My 480GB one is still choking.

[HawkinsonB]

Just now, maxtch said:

OS X will not work well with small storage unless you do absolutely minimal with it. My 480GB one is still choking.

ouch! What's taking up so much space? I currently have a rMBP w/ 256gb storage and i'm sitting at about half with all the programs i've installed to it(coincidentally the same as my desktop). My hope was to use my 4tb Seagate drive as a mass storage for files and pull ONLY what i want to work on to the SSD and have my work-space there. I won't be downloading any excess programs on my Max OSX system like steam, that's what windows is for!

 

However back to my original question, how should I set up my 4tb Seagate drive to act like that as:

Quote

I've read into the FAT32 format but heard there was limiting file sizes to 4gb, that is a no go. I've heard about exFAT however there seems to be a reliability issue here. Are there more options? Is NFTS available to read/write on MacOSX?

 

[maxtch]

29 minutes ago, HawkinsonB said:

ouch! What's taking up so much space? I currently have a rMBP w/ 256gb storage and i'm sitting at about half with all the programs i've installed to it(coincidentally the same as my desktop). My hope was to use my 4tb Seagate drive as a mass storage for files and pull ONLY what i want to work on to the SSD and have my work-space there. I won't be downloading any excess programs on my Max OSX system like steam, that's what windows is for!

 

However back to my original question, how should I set up my 4tb Seagate drive to act like that as:

 

In fact what Fusion Drive does is EXACTLY that but all automagically behind the scenes. What exactly are you doing on Windows?

[HawkinsonB]

6 minutes ago, maxtch said:

In fact what Fusion Drive does is EXACTLY that but all automagically behind the scenes. What exactly are you doing on Windows?

The typical usage for a 20 year old college student w/ a compSci Major. Gaming, Visual Studio, breaking things, fixing them, modding things, running DKs and Game Engines I just mess around in. I could upgrade to 32gbs of ram and throw 16gb at it in a virtual machine but i'm not looking forward to limiting my 970 or 1241v3, more than likely causing a bottleneck.

 

There has to be a better solution than just a VM.

[maxtch]

7 minutes ago, HawkinsonB said:

The typical usage for a 20 year old college student w/ a compSci Major. Gaming, Visual Studio, breaking things, fixing them, modding things, running DKs and Game Engines I just mess around in. I could upgrade to 32gbs of ram and throw 16gb at it in a virtual machine but i'm not looking forward to limiting my 970 or 1241v3, more than likely causing a bottleneck.

 

There has to be a better solution than just a VM.

VS isn't exactly GPU bounded so overprovision your VM's CPU and memory will give it almost full access to all system resources. And you can try move your code to OS X native (C++ is the best shot, then C#) using OpenGL for your gaming console.

 

By the way O am also a CS student but I managed my years without touching Windows. All things done using OS X.

[HawkinsonB]

Just now, maxtch said:

VS isn't exactly GPU bounded so overprovision your VM's CPU and memory will give it almost full access to all system resources. And you can try move your code to OS X native (C++ is the best shot, then C#) using OpenGL for your gaming console.

 

By the way O am also a CS student but I managed my years without touching Windows. All things done using OS X.

Awesome dude! Yeah I do all my C++ coding via the terminal and Xcode. But if my original way can be done, i'd much rather do that as i have windows VM on my rMBP, while the hardware is definitely different, it struggles. And after playing around with a win10 VM it just does not work the way I want it to within a virtual environment. 

[maxtch]

23 minutes ago, HawkinsonB said:

Awesome dude! Yeah I do all my C++ coding via the terminal and Xcode. But if my original way can be done, i'd much rather do that as i have windows VM on my rMBP, while the hardware is definitely different, it struggles. And after playing around with a win10 VM it just does not work the way I want it to within a virtual environment. 

Well MBP and E3-1231v3 are very different. I, for a while, used my DreamCorvette rig as a Hackintosh and boy had I run so many virtual machines on it. Just try it, wipe Windows off the E3-1241v3 rig and give it full OS X and put Windows on virtualization. Different hardware will give you very different results.

[HawkinsonB]

3 minutes ago, maxtch said:

Well MBP and E3-1231v3 are very different. I, for a while, used my DreamCorvette rig as a Hackintosh and boy had I run so many virtual machines on it. Just try it, wipe Windows off the E3-1241v3 rig and give it full OS X and put Windows on virtualization. Different hardware will give you very different results.

While a good idea, I'm not going to do this as it doesn't align with what I want. 

 

Does anyone know what I can do about the 4tb drive in cross OS support for >4gb files?

[maxtch]

13 minutes ago, HawkinsonB said:

While a good idea, I'm not going to do this as it doesn't align with what I want. 

 

Does anyone know what I can do about the 4tb drive in cross OS support for >4gb files?

This is pretty much impossible if you require read/write access. You can get a NAS and throw all your hard drives there, and access them over a network on both your Windows machine and your Mac.

[HawkinsonB]

Just now, maxtch said:

This is pretty much impossible if you require read/write access. You can get a NAS and throw all your hard drives there, and access them over a network on both your Windows machine and your Mac.

Well i found an option in another thread in here regarding NFTS Usbs, and thanks to ALwin:

Quote

NTFS is a file system format that is proprietary to Microsoft, so in order to ensure OSX can read/write to NTFS volumes, OSX has to have a driver for NTFS.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

 

And the reverse if you want Windows to read/write to OSX's HFS volumes.

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

 

ExFat is a nice middle ground between the two that works on both.  So are other file formats used by NAS systems.

I then asked him about reliability issues:

Quote

I have used ExFat on some of my drives, along with having Paragon NTFS on my MacBook and HFS+ for Windows on my desktop... they all work fine without any issue.

looks like paragon's option will be just fine!