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Okay so I know this subject has been touched on but.. my specific question is this.

I recently bought an SSD and made it my boot drive, I bought a caddy for my super drive spot and put my old HDD in its place. I then backed up and erased the HDD. I want to move my home folder on to the HDD but im worried about performance. I primarily use Logic Pro X and Ableton. and I have some VERY big logic and ableton projects. Should I move the rest of my home folder to HDD and keep my logic files on SSD or should I just move my entire home folder to HDD?

Brandon Uhlir
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2 Answers2

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You could just use a Fusion Drive. Note that this will erase all data on both drives, so you'll need another drive to store your data on.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2014011/how-to-make-your-own-fusion-drive.html

At0micMutex
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  • +1 even though I don't follow this advice. It's a nice parlor trick and I encourage everyone to try setting up their own Fustion Drives, RAID stripes, concatenated disk volumes and other fun storage olympics to test, benchmark and just learn how things work. When I have a computer I need to rely on to get actual work done, I only go with one setup. Home Folder on alternate storage when I want more than one OS or I can only afford fast storage for the OS but can't afford it for the entire OS+apps+user data container. – bmike Sep 03 '15 at 14:41
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Since the days of Next Computer - the concept of separating the user's entire home folder from the OS boot volume has been designed into OS X.

That's the clear way to go when you have SSD of limited space and need large files to exist.

You will receive almost all the benefits of an SSD by setting up the Mac to have the user home folder on a HDD and the system, programs and caches on SSD.

Other options:

  • home bake a fusion drive - it's technically possible, but way more work to support it in my experience than the benefits you receive. It is a cool experiment to try on a system you don't care to wipe and set up again later, so you could make a good backup and try it.
  • split the files and sym link / pick some large files that work OK when located on the non-user drive and non-boot drive.

Some relevant reading includes:

Community
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bmike
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