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I'll be getting my first MacBook Pro today. Late 2013 with 256GB of SSD space.

For my development activities, I'll be needing Windows 8.1 running alongside OSX. I've done some reading on both Bootcamp and Parallels regarding this. The plan is to use Bootcamp and to have ~150GB for the Windows installation and Windows programs. The rest would be for OSX plus my 50GB worth of media content that I'd preferably share between both OSs.

Question: Would it be possible for my media files residing in one partition to be accessed by the operating system on the other partition? It's clear that Parallels could do this, but I'd be needing a good enough reason to invest in a license. Also I do not mind booting in an out of OSs once in a while. What I'm not clear of, is the file system compatibility between the two operating systems.

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2 Answers 2

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Either…

  • put the files in the Mac partition: Boot Camp has drivers for read/write to HFS+
  • put the files in the Windows partition: install software on OS X such as ntfs-3g
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  • write to HFS+ ? Really ? that's nice :)
    – Thomas Ayoub
    Commented Jun 19, 2014 at 11:08
  • @Thomas Yep, I install the Boot Camp drivers on various Windows PCs just for this feature for external disks.
    – grg ♦
    Commented Jun 19, 2014 at 11:14
  • Your first option sounds better to me than your second. I won't mind where the files reside :)
    – Tru
    Commented Jun 20, 2014 at 6:40
  • @Tru if you plan to use the files for work with windows, consider the second one, it'll be faster
    – Thomas Ayoub
    Commented Jun 20, 2014 at 8:00
  • Are you sure about the boot camp drivers having HFS+ write support? All other sources seem to indicate the HFS+ driver is read-only!
    – Brecht Machiels
    Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 11:14
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Just create a bigger partition for Windows (~200GB) then once windows is installed split the windows partition in two parts (150GB - 50GB) then format the little one in Exfat (which works with OsX > 10.6.8 and Wxp > SP2 and allow the use of big files).

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  • Nice approach. But I do have to make sure the shared space doesn't grow much in the future.
    – Tru
    Commented Jun 20, 2014 at 5:25
  • @Tru Yes unfortunately, once the split between mac os and windows partition is done, you can't change it.
    – Thomas Ayoub
    Commented Jun 20, 2014 at 5:28

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