MacOS – Most important MacOS folders to move from SSD to spinning HDD, and how to move them

foldersmacosmountssdsymlink

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?

Best Answer

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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