Advice on wherw to put things: now have 2 internal MacbookPro drives

[theMouthPiece]

Hi All

Well... I purchased a new 750GB 7500 HDD and was going to upgrade my internal 350GB drive in my MacbookPro, but spotted a caddy pack to replace the DVD drive with the HDD, and put the DVD into the 2nd caddy with USB etc. So... I still get to use the DVD when I need to (not that often).

So... from tomorrow I will have my internal 350GB drive plus a new 750GB HDD inside my MacbookPro. Wohoooo!

What I'm after is some advice as to the best configuration for the two drives.

I'll format it Mac OSX Journal - but what should I move to there now? The apps I use the most are;

• Lightroom: I'm an amateur photographer and have a huge photo catalogue, but all of my images are stores elsewhere anyway i.e. not on the internal 350GB HDD.
• LogicPro: I have a range of hardware and software synths, plug ins etc which I am sure would benefit to be moved onto the new HDD
• MS Office: most often Excel, Word and Powerpoint
• Spotify and iTunes: my iTunes library is already on an external HDD
• Firefox: use this all the time
• Mail: use this all the time

So... what should I move...? nothing, something, little, lots?


How do I get best use from a dual HDD system.


Thanks all

[onceagain]

Quote: Originally Posted by theMouthPiece Well... I purchased a new 750GB 7500 HDD and was going to upgrade my internal 350GB drive in my MacbookPro, but spotted a caddy pack to replace the DVD drive with the HDD, and put the DVD into the 2nd caddy with USB etc. So... I still get to use the DVD when I need to (not that often). So... from tomorrow I will have my internal 350GB drive plus a new 750GB HDD inside my MacbookPro. Wohoooo!

Excellent decision. I do the same in my MBP, with an 480GB SSD in the main drive bay, and a 750GB drive in the optical bay.

Quote: What I'm after is some advice as to the best configuration for the two drives. I'll format it Mac OSX Journal - but what should I move to there now?

I'd recommend formatting both as encrypted journaled drives.

If you don't think you need all that space on your primary drive - consider booting from the smaller one. Then, use the bigger one for music, pictures, movies, etc. + backups from the primary drive (i.e. cloned disc images). This is what I'm doing. You can mount the 2nd drive only when needed, to save on battery power, wear, etc.

If you really need all that space daily, then do the opposite, and make the smaller drive your backup drive. You will not be able to back up everything on the bigger drive if it is more than 350GB stored, but you can at least back up the most important stuff. If you go this route, I would use symbolic links to store music, movies and pictures outside of your home directory, so you can easily back up your home directory to the smaller drive.

If you don't know how to do that - do this after bringing up the terminal:

cd /Users/Shared
mkdir media
chown 700 media
mv ~/Music media
mv ~/Pictures media
mv ~/Movies media
cd ~
ln -s /Users/Shared/media
ln -s /Users/Shared/Pictures
ln -s /Users/Shared/Movies
cd ~
ls -aFl

Now you can see your big files are actually stored in /Users/Shared/media and look like they're in your home directory.

When you copy your home directory to your backup drive, these big files will be excluded. You can back THEM up by copying /Users/Shared/media to a backup drive - which may be a different drive since your small drive may not have the capacity for them.

[onceagain]

Just an update on that last post - sometimes you will get a message that says something like "Whatever" can't be moved/deleted because it is required by the system. This happens for things like Documents, Library, Music, Movies, etc., in your home directory.

If this happens, you can get around it by logging in as a different user (creating an account if necessary), and then using the terminal (UNIX) "su" command to become the user that owns the directories (example: su yourusername). You can then do the work described above without interference from Apple's notion of what should be in your home directory and how it should be in there.

So, in this case, the whole sequence, after having logged in (from the console) as a different user, would look something like this:

su <your user name> (it will ask for your password)
cd /Users/Shared
mkdir media
chown 700 media
mv ~/Music media
mv ~/Pictures media
mv ~/Movies media
cd ~
ln -s /Users/Shared/Music (note the error in the previous post, I said "media")
ln -s /Users/Shared/Pictures
ln -s /Users/Shared/Movies
cd ~
ls -aFl
exit