how many GB can you have as a boot drive on Macbook Pro os x lion

That's what Apple recommends for a TM drive. If you fill your internal drive to its safe capacity (about 85% of its total capacity) and back up with TM to a drive of the same capacity, you'll have little or no room on the backup drive for anything more than the latest backup. Older backups, which are the unique benefit of TM, will have to be deleted almost immediately.

If you want large storage and fast speed on your boot drive try what I did with my Late 2011 MacBook Pro.

I searched on amazon for a terabyte HD with the same connection and speed of the original HD of my mac.

i finnaly came accrost this in the amazon store:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005DVJJWQ/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00

When I got it in the mail i hooked it up to my HD addaptor and connected the addapter with the HD to my MacBook Pro via USB.

I went to terminal and entered in this comand:

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2

disk1= the internal hd the one you are currently booted from

you can check to see what the correct name is of the drives by going in disk utility and getting the info.

disk2= the new 1TB HD

hit enter after typing in the command with the correct addresess.

this will start copying ALL your data (every 1 and 0 will be copied so their is no worie of losing anything in the transfer).

the only downside to this command is that it will go very slowly, if i recall correcly it took me 3 or 4 days to transfer all of a 750 HD to a 1TB HD it was worth it tho because nothing was left behind, everything was just how i had it on my 750 HD.

after everything is transfered you need to change the size of the partition on the 1TB HD or else when you boot into it, it will tell you that the drive is the size of the drive you just moved from.

this is where it gets tricky...

you ether need to use a partition editing program or use the command line in terminal.

goto this artical, they will walk you through the commands to resize a partition:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1055274/marchgeekfactor.html

or you could just buy a program called iPartition from here:

http://www.coriolis-systems.com/

resize the partition to how ever many bites your drive is

install it in your mac

enjoy a 1 TB internal drive

eww wrote:

That's what Apple recommends for a TM drive. If you fill your internal drive to its safe capacity (about 85% of its total capacity) and back up with TM to a drive of the same capacity, you'll have little or no room on the backup drive for anything more than the latest backup. Older backups, which are the unique benefit of TM, will have to be deleted almost immediately.

Storage of previous backups (to the limit of storage available) is no way unique to TM.