Solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming commonplace, and the first time you use one as a boot drive, you realise why - they're faster than hard drives to a ridiculous degree. The downside is they're currently still very expensive compared to hard drives, such that only smaller capacities are currently affordable. Macs are now being offered with what I call 'mixed drive' configurations, including both a (small; often 256 GB) SSD and an HDD, and many people wonder how to make the most of this setup.
I have two SSD-equipped machines here, including a mixed-drive iMac, and have recently configured it in what I believe is a good compromise setup to take advantage of SSD speed without sacrificing the roomy storage of a hard drive (or causing excessive wear to the SSD). This is just one possible setup, but I hope it's useful to you.
Note: I've verified that this approach works perfectly with both Lion (10.7) and Mountain Lion (10.8), including when upgrading from the former to the latter.
Mac; iPad; iPhone; Watch; TV; Music; Support; Shopping Bag; Cancel App Store Preview. Matt DiDomenico. IPad & iPhone See All. Trail Maker Navigation IP Info Utilities InfiniBase Utilities bitTrack Utilities More ways to shop: Visit an Apple Store, call 1-800-MY-APPLE, or find a reseller. Choose your country or region. Radio One and CBC Music. CBC Music Schedule and Playlogs. The new MacKeeper app delivers multilayered protection from malware, online threats, and identity theft & Mac performance optimization. Learn what is MacKeeper.
The basic approach here is to have the OS on the SSD (the default setup on mixed-drive Macs), and to move certain folders onto the hard drive, providing links to those folders in the places they used to be. Before beginning, let me try to pre-empt two possible comments:
'You can tell iTunes (etc) to keep its data elsewhere!'
Indeed you can (usually by holding the alt/option key whilst launching the app), but you'll have to do it for each and every app that has such a capability - and some apps won't let you. The method I'm about to describe, however, will just work, without changing any settings.
'You can put the home folder on the hard drive, and use the Accounts pane to point to it!'
That's also true (unlock the Accounts pane, then right-click on your account in the list), but you're losing the speed benefit of having certain parts of your home folder on the SSD (such as caches, preferences, your development projects and so forth).
Matt And Chris Mac Os X
It's your choice if you want to use one of the above limited expedients, but I feel that you can find a better balance by doing just a little bit of extra work.
Copying and Linking folders on the HDD
With that all said, let's offload some folders to the hard drive. It's extremely easy to do, even though there's a tiny, tiny bit of typing on the Terminal involved. If you're scared of that, by all means run away now and get a friend to help. Also, make sure you have an up-to-date backup of your boot drive before beginning; that's just common sense.
We're really just going to be repeating the same process over and over, once for each folder that you want to live on the HDD instead of the SDD. The process is simply this:
- In the Finder, copy the folder from the SSD to the HDD. Check that it was copied successfully.
- In Terminal,
cdto the location of the original folder (on the SSD), and delete it viasudo rm -rf foldername. - In Terminal, still in the location of the original folder you just deleted, make a link to the copy of the folder on the HDD, via
ln -s /Volumes/HDDname/path/to/foldername.
(In steps 2 and 3 above, you should of course substitute the actual names and paths of the relevant folders and volume instead of ‘foldername', ‘HDDname', and ‘path/to/foldername'. Hopefully that's obvious. For the ln command, think of the syntax as being 'put a link here, that points to there'.)
Matt And Chris Mac Osmond
That's it. You'll probably want to put all these copied folders somewhere sensible on the HDD; I created a folder called 'matt' at the root of the HDD, and copied my folders into there - you can see a picture of it below. I've heard that you should not create a 'Users' folder at the root of a non-boot disk, however.
You should also note that, if you've copied and linked one of the 'special' folders in your home directory (such as Pictures), the new folder/link won't have the special icon that the Finder usually provides. That's normal, and completely harmless. You may also need to re-add the folder to the Finder's sidebar.
There's nothing else to it, except to decide which folders to actually offload.
Choosing which folders to put on the HDD
This is a personal decision, but generally you'll want to offload folders that fit any of these criteria:
- Are very large. Your SSD is small, and it shouldn't be bursting at the seams.
- Will change extremely often, particularly if they contain large files. SSDs are notably subject to wear, especially if they don't support TRIM.
- Contain files which aren't involved in performance-critical work.
Try to keep in mind that the HDD is perfectly good enough for almost everything, and that we've been using HDDs for years. It's not the poor cousin, and it hasn't suddenly acquired the performance characteristics of a floppy disk drive. This is just about balance, and sensible optimisations to help get the most from the new SSD.
In my own case, I offloaded several of the folders in my home directory onto the HDD, as shown in the screenshot below.
Note that the Dropbox folder is created by the utility of the same name, and that the Backups folder is one I created for my own use.
In addition to those, as shown in the picture, I offloaded Downloads, Movies and Pictures. I don't keep things permanently in my Downloads folder yet its contents change constantly, so it was an excellent candidate for offloading. I also don't heavily use iPhoto or Aperture, and keep my graphic work files in my Documents folder, so I could offload Pictures. I don't do any video editing, and have a large Movies folder, so I offloaded it too.
I did not offload the Music folder, but I did offload the actual media files (and mobile apps) that iTunes uses, as shown in the picture of my Music folder's contents below.
Note that on your Mac, the 'iTunes Music' folder may instead be called 'iTunes Media'. The reason I didn't offload the entire Music folder was to keep my GarageBand files on the SSD for performance, and nor did I offload the entire parent iTunes folder so that I could keep iTunes' library and metadata files on the SSD for the same reason.
You may find that you'll want to keep some of those folders on the SSD, and equally you may find that you want to offload additional folders to the HDD. For example, I also put my Virtual Machines folder on the HDD, and you might also want to put your Steam games there (they live in ~/Library/Application Support/Steam).
Just follow the same process as above, and you should be fine. It takes only a few minutes, and it should ensure that you get the maximum benefit from the SSD without being unduly hindered by its comparatively small capacity.
Please note that I can't provide any support with this process. If you're not comfortable using the Terminal, or don't understand what's going on, please don't try. I can't respond to any enquiries about this.
If you enjoyed this article, you may want to follow me (@mattgemmell) on Twitter, where I always announce new articles and projects.
A few days ago, I posted my Top X List of Mac OS X Annoyances. As predicted, there were a few useless responses from the zealots who felt a need to defend the Mac, but there were also many useful comments - more on those in a minute. Some people seem to confuse being the best with being perfect. A valid defense of an annoying characteristic of Mac OS X is not that it's better than Windows - that's setting the bar awful low, don't you think?
The other thing that many people seem to miss is the fact that my list comes from years of using Mac OS X and Linux (not Windows). If Linux is tainting my perspective by offering a better desktop experience, the Mac has serious problems. Isn't it supposed to be the archetype of usability?
The reason why I want to find solutions for the things that annoy me is because I want to buy a new MacBook Pro (or whatever the cool laptops are called by the time I buy one) and use it exclusively, plugging in peripherals when I'm at my desk. In most cases, I've tried to adopt 'the Mac way,' because I know it's futile to try to affect change in the Mac world. (It's almost as much of a quagmire as US politics, where people are quick to place you on 'the other team' if you dare speak out of line.) However, there are a few things that are quite simply annoying, and regardless of whether you agree, it's hard to ignore the fact that there's room for improvement.
Luckily, most of the annoyances can be resolved. Before I get to the solutions, however, I want to list the two major annoyances for which no solution has been offered (please feel free to make a suggestion):
Maximizing
I learned that the little green button is a 'zoom' button. (In other words, maximizing isn't broken - it just doesn't exist.) Regardless of whether you think the zoom feature is useless (I do), it's no replacement for maximizing.
I frequently speak at conferences. If you've ever seen me demo something during a talk, you've probably seen me open a terminal window. I manually resize the window to be as small as possible, increase the font size to a comfortable viewing level (which increases the size of the window), then manually resize the window to fill as much of the screen as possible. I'd rather maximize the window and be done.
When I'm using my 12' PowerBook, I'm impaired by the resolution. I don't mind, because that's part of having such a small laptop. (I love it.) However, I'd like to maximize my windows rather than manually resizing them to fill the screen. Yes, having lots of maximized windows is usually annoying, but Expose pretty much eliminates any disadvantage. Plus, even without maximizing, it's hard to grab the edges once you have more than a few windows, so depriving us of this feature offers no real benefit.
Command-Tab
At first, it might seem that selecting between applications instead of windows is a good thing, but not when you consider other characteristics of the Mac. First, when you close the last window of an application, it continues running. This isn't annoying in isolation, and there are advantages to leaving apps running, but it has a nasty side-effect: command-tab pollution. The Finder is always running, so there's some pollution by default. Plus, if you command-tab to an application with only minimized windows, they stay minimized. Again, in isolation, these characteristics may not seem so bad, and they're not. Combined, they make command-tab on the Mac almost useless. Yes, Expose is great, and I use it frequently, but it's no substitute. (A possible fix is Witch, but this is one thing that shouldn't be broken in the first place.)
Except for a few annoyances that are just part of 'the Mac way' and not likely to change, most of my other annoyances can be solved:
Only One Desktop
The solution to the 'only one desktop' problem seems to be Desktop Manager. Quite a few people have suggested it.
The Clock
Nate Klaiber sent me a solution to the clock annoyance. The trick is that the clock format is under the 'International' section of your preferences. Thanks, Nate!
Adam pointed me to MenuCalendarClock, which looks even better. wClock looks good, too.
Safari
Matt Simpson pointed out a 'Full Keyboard Access' option that you can set to 'All Controls' to make Safari behave correctly. In other words, you can navigate forms without a mouse. Thanks Matt!
In summary, although the Mac has many shortcomings by default, the vast majority of them can be resolved, and only a few of them require the installation of additional software. Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions about how to make the Mac less annoying! :-)
