I have what I think is a rather unusual setup that I'm about to attempt -- looking for feedback about it in case anyone can give me suggestions on how to do this right in advance. HARDWARE iMac 2.80 GHz quad-core i7 (Mid-2011 series) 32 GB RAM 256 GB SSD boot drive 1 TB SATA drive (secondary internal) SOFTWARE Mac OS X 10.8 Parallels 7 (latest version) Windows 7 Pro (32-bit) NOTE: Technically, I could go with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Pro if necessary to facilitate things. If not, I'll just stick with 32-bit to keep the system demands lighter. This iMac is an administrative station that I've recently setup in my office. Most of the horsepower of this system is going to be allocated toward running Retrospect 7.7 setup within one of the Windows 7 guest OS environments. I'll have two other Windows 7 guest OSes running too, but they'll be performing very light work -- not worth detailing, except to comment that they exist. The Mac host environment also will not be doing much except running Parallels. I've basically condensed three Windows 7 administrative systems down onto a well-powered iMac host, and most of that horsepower is going to go toward the Windows 7 guest OS detailed below. Retrospect will be performing network backups of about a dozen different Windows stations on the network on-and-off throughout the day. This guest OS is a recreation of an actual physical PC that I had setup on our network. It would perform backups by duplicating a source's home folder to a local folder stored on the hard drive of this backup station. After all those duplications were done, it would then copy all of the duplicates onto an attached USB drive -- one of three USB drives that I rotated through over a 3-week period. So Retrospect copies files from the networked PCs onto an internal SATA drive, then from that drive onto an external USB drive. When this setup was on an actual Windows PC, of course that was never a problem because it was copying from an NTFS volume to an NTFS volume. But here's the wrinkle. I have the 1 TB internal hard drive on this iMac that is totally unused, since the OS and apps are all running on the ultra-fast SSD. I'd like to have Retrospect store the folder backups onto this drive, so I'll have to make it accessible to the Windows 7 guest OS in one fashion or another. 1. Can I use the Windows 7 guest OS to format the 1 TB drive into NTFS format? I know the Mac host can only read NTFS and not write it, so I'm not sure I can do this from within a virtual system. 2. If I can format the drive with NTFS, will Retrospect be able to read and write to the drive from within Parallels? 3. If the answer to either or both of those questions is "no" because the Mac cannot write to NTFS, can I do this by purchasing a third-party NTFS driver such as Paragon NTFS for Mac? 4. Would I be better off creating a second virtual disk (.HDD file) and store that on the 1 TB drive as a place for Retrospect to store its files? If so, Let's assume that out of that 1 TB I can set aside 400 GB just for this purpose (right now I need only 170G but that'll give me plenty of buffer room for expansion). Would it perform better if I did not make it an expanding disk? I'd appreciate advice from anyone on any aspect of this setup, or ideas on how to do it differently so it would be better. Thanks!
you can try this solution: 1. download NTFS-3G in this link. this will allow you to create ntfs paritions in your mac hdd here's the link: http://www.tuxera.com/mac/tuxerantfs_2010.12-RC.dmg 2. after you install ntfs-3g, open mac disk utility and create an ntfs partition 3. share the new ntfs partition in parallels watch this screencast. http://screencast.com/t/IxJaZvgxT
NTFS 3G is something i wanted to suggest. You might also create a virtual HDD file and store it on external drive - this might work as well. So you have 2 options at least. Paragon will work too but NTFS 3G is free and always worked for me
