“Regardless of whether you’re using the Developer Preview or the forthcoming public beta, bear in mind that OS X Yosemite is beta software,” Peter Cohen writes for iMore.
“It’s best not to install it as the primary operating system on your only Mac, so here are instructions for making a new partition to run it from,” Cohen writes. “This way, Yosemite will be isolated from the rest of your Mac — even if something drastically bad happens, the only bad thing that should happen will be to that partition, not to your entire machine.”
“Partitioning your hard drive will reduce the amount of available space for Mavericks, so make sure to give yourself some wiggle room,” Cohen writes. “What’s more, make sure to give yourself enough space to run Yosemite effectively.”
Read more in the full article here.
I’m just going to use a 32GB USB drive and install it on that. Seems easier than going through the whole repartitioning. At least to me…..
If it’s USB 2.0 (for the port and/or the drive), that works, but performance is degraded. And USB 2.0 flash drives are often too slow for booting a full OS. So there is a good case for creating a small separate partition on the main internal drive.
Alternately, you can use a 32GB or larger SDXC card, if your Mac has a slot (and it’s a recent type that is “high speed”). Even my Mac mini has one. I recently found that I can boot my 2011 Mac mini from an SDXC card, and it’s quite fast. I reformatted it for Mac and installed Mavericks on it. Probably not as fast as a “real” SSD connected internally over SATA, but it’s noticeably faster than the stock HD.
You can get a 32 GB SDXC card for less than $20 these days. The one I got is described as
“Sony 32 GB Secure Digital High Capacity (SDHC/SDXC)- Class 10 /UHS-I 40 MBps Read”
and now I see 64GB SDXC cards for less than $40.
Same with me. I have an extra 500 GB USB portable drive. I just wipe that thing out and install it there. Keeps my main stuff really safe. 🙂
Partitioning is easy and a good way to go. Take heed to the CoreStorage bits though. Once you install 10.10 on the partition, CS is enabled and you can’t play with the partitions until you revert the volume. No bog deal, but it freaks out a lot fo people!