Question 240GB SSD enough for dual boot Win11/Linux Zorin?

[Geos54]

My current Win11 C: drive is 128 GB. I'd like to ditch Win11 completely and use only Linux but there are a few Win programs I still need to run that I'm not sure emulators like Wine or Bottle support so I think the best solution for now would be dual boot Win/Linux. I got a 240GB SSD but now I'm wondering if that's big enough for dual boot. Thanks.

 

[kschendel]

If you're just keeping the minimum boot stuff for both OS's, yes. I've done it. 128GB is a little tight for Winders if it's your primary OS; if it's not, you should be OK. And you can fit Linux in way less then 128GB if you keep most of your stuff on a different drive. I think most of my cluster boxes run around 20 GB for a linux distro and that includes development tools and libre office.

 

[tcsenter]

It's plenty for just Windows and a few apps? My mom's laptop doesn't have many LARGE apps (e.g. Office) installed only some of the basics, occupies about 65GB with hibernate file and ~4GB allocated to System Restore. Is this a tower/desktop? You could just leave them both in, configure the 240GB as default or priority boot device in UEFI/BIOS, when you need to boot the Windows drive, restart and invoke the Boot Menu, select the 128GB drive. That's I what do on my desktops that have room for two drives. Have not used 'dual boot' config on the same drive in years.

 

[mikeymikec]

128GB is easily large enough for Windows, the big question is what else. My very generous estimate for a modern Windows OS footprint is 64GB; in reality it's more like 32GB but IMO there's little point in planning for the best case scenario in the long term.

My Linux Mint install (minus Timeshift data and my home directory) is 22GB in size.

 

[Geos54]

Thanks for all the replies. Next step is to restore my W11 install from a disk image I've created onto the new SSD. I'm not clear on how to do that. I'll post a separate question.

 

[tcsenter]

Unless it's a laptop or other reason that it cannot accommodate both drives, I would just use two drives connected each with it's own OS. It is all the same trouble of a dual boot configuration. i.e. having to restart the system and then manually selecting the OS/device to boot into? But no worries about one OS (or updates) mucking with the boot partition/schema. If one drive dies, you have the other functional and ready to go, as opposed to dual boot configuration where you are left dead in the water if the drive dies.