User Tip: Creating a lean, fast Boot Drive

One of the best speedups for any Mac that can support multiple drives is to create a Boot Drive, with only System, Library, Applications, and the hidden Unix files including Paging/Swap. This improves overall performance by eliminating the I/O "traffic jam" that can occur on fast Macs that have only one drive.

If this Boot Drive is a very fast drive such as a 10,000 RPM drive or a low-latency SSD, the performance improvement can be quite dramatic.

To establish a Boot Drive on the fast drive or SSD, move all User files off to other drives. These articles may help:

Japamac's Blog: Make space for performance -- Moving the Home Folder

http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/

How to manage Restore from Backups to such a system:

OSX Tips: Setting-up a new Mac from an old one or its Backups

Transferring Home Folders not on a Startup volume

be sure to heed Pondini's warning:

If you do put home folders on a separate volume, it's strongly recommended that an Admin account and its home folder remain on the Startup volume. If there isn't one, and you have a problem with the separate home folder volume, you cannot log on to your Mac! And in some cases it will greatly complicatetransferring to a new Mac.

So if you're transferring from an available Mac that doesn't have an Admin account on its Startup volume, create one via System Preferences > Accounts before starting.

Once established, there are additional flourishes and tweaks that can further improve performance such as moving certain folders back to the Boot Drive. These are more complex, require some use of Terminal commands, and are not covered here.