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I recently installed a SSD on my Early 2009 Mac Pro. While searching the site, and finding many questions on the subject of SSD to HDD swapping, linking, and cloning. No one actually mentioned the folders that would be best to link.

I have symlinked /Users/user and /Libray on SSD to HDD, but feel like I might be missing one. Also, I noticed that this also saves most of my app settings, as Dropbox was able to simply startup without any configurations. Would this also be the case for mail, since I linked the whole /Library folder?

Currently I have Lion, and the Apps folder on the SSD. My goal is to have the data hogs linked from HDD to SSD. Would it be better to hard link them versus symlink?
Edit: I am running my OS on SSD, and want to symlink to folders from OS on old HDD. Which are the best candidates?

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What are you asking? You have two drives. What are your trying to accomplish? Your question is very unclear. And for reference, hard links cannot span across volumes; symbolic links can. – Daniel Lawson♦ Feb 25 '12 at 6:30
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Symlinking /Users/* is not a wise idea. If you want to offload your user directory, there are ways of moving to another partition properly (OS X doesn't do well with symlinks, trust me). But to offload that much really defeats the purpose of having an SSD as many of your programs won't be caching to it now (~/Library/Caches). It's always better to offload big content, like the contents of iTunes Music, Photos, Documents, Downloads (big one that saves on cell wearing), etc. But you should generally leave ~/ alone. – cksum Feb 25 '12 at 6:34
So symlink the individual folders? – FossilizedCarlos Feb 25 '12 at 6:36
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Simlinking users is creepy. If you want to change the users home, go to User Account panel, right click the user and change it under "Advanced Settings" – Max Ried Feb 25 '12 at 9:34
Thanks Max. That's basically what I was trying to achieve. – FossilizedCarlos Feb 25 '12 at 23:23

1 Answer

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For my Hackintosh SSD-HHD "separation" purposes, I moved my /Users directory to be mounted directly on my (spinning) HDD partition. Details here.

I view symlinking /Users to be generally risky for MacOS.

Haven't yet moved my /Library mount; not certain merit of doing that (eg: hard to gauge /Library disk activity). Would be great if someone could detail the default system log paths for MacOS (I'm running Lion) to help sort this out.

In any case, my /Users dir definitely gets hammered with lots of write IO + storage capacity (both things not optimal for Flash-memory-based storage), so definitely moved that off.

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