After buying my first Mac Pro (2009) I soon realized that I needed more than the standard 1TB hard drive installed in the Mac Pro. I went a head and upgraded with two additional 1TB hard drives and one 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD).
I installed Snow Leopard and my Applications on the 128GB SSD so I could use it as a boot drive. The three 1TB Hard drives were configured as a fast striped RAID setup using the disk utility. Then I simply moved my home folder (the documents, downloads, movies, music, pictures, desktop, etc.) to the RAID setup.
Move your entire home folder:
So basically I wanted to move my home folder (the documents, downloads, movies, music, pictures, desktop, etc.) to the RAID setup. As most probably don’t know Apple has this feature built right in to Snow Leopard. There is a configuration pane in System Preferences to do right this with a few clicks with the mouse.
First of all you need to copy your home folder to the destination hard drive — in my case the striped RAID setup.
Second, open Accounts within System Preferences. Make sure the lock is unlocked (click on it and type password) so changes can be made. Right-click on the user name of the account for which you copied the home folder and choose ‘Advanced Options…’.
This takes you to a pane where, amongst other things, you can change the location of your home folder.
After choosing the new location, click OK and restart your Mac.
After restarting the changes take effect and the home folder location has changed and all the system icons (the documents, downloads, movies, music, pictures, desktop, etc.) are transferred to the new location.
Symbolic Links (Advanced):
Another way to do this is to use symbolic link which is another smart way of organizing your Documents, photos or video.
Before using the ‘ln’ command to create symbolic links you should get more information by typing ‘man ln’ or ‘ln’ in the Terminal.
First you will need to move the folder to the location you want to keep your files.
Simply drag and drop your Music folder located in ‘/Volumes/BOOT/Users/user/Music’ from the ‘BOOT’ volume to the ‘RAID’ volume.
Then to add a symbolic link from the Music folder on the ‘BOOT’ drive to the ‘RAID’ drive you will type:
‘ln -s /Volumes/RAID/Users/user/Music /Volumes/BOOT/Users/user/Music’
Finish safely:
To be sure everything went fine and your files are in good conditions open disk utility and repair permissions after wards, just to be safe!.
Good luck,
Martin Bay | Martin Bay .NET
