Moving users folder to another partition

why do you want to do this? there is no point in partitioning the main drive. all it will do is to slow down your computer. there is no benefit to this process.

but it's easy to move your home folder. copy it to another partition. then go to system preferences->accounts. unlock the lock, then control-click on your account and select "Advanced options". in the popup change the home directory location to point to the other partition. then restart the computer and your home folder will be on the other partition. then you can trash the old one.

it makes drive read+write operations slower as it has to switch between partitions. as for formatting the system partition you can always reinstall snow leopard over your current install even when everything is on the same partition. and if you have a backup (everybody should) you can reformat the whole drive and do a fresh install if you want to and then use Migration Assistant to migrate your users from backup.

I say "prove it."

The heads will move irregardless - so what? I'm more worried about long slow seeks when items are allowed to be placed on the farthest tracks.

Short stroking a drive can definitely improve performance.

Keeping static files on another partition might be perfect strategy.

How well are writes using out of order writes.
The home folder library prefs and system are constantly reading and writing.
How poor or well is OS X optimizing directories? Not great but there are hot list etc.

If you want to do something, I say, "Do it" and learn for yourself though.

Ideal is to have home folder though on another physical drive, which is also very easy.

If you may want to erase and restore the system, isolating it is better than relying on TimeMachine restores.

The hatter wrote:
I say "prove it."

The heads will move irregardless - so what?

it was always my understanding that when a drive is partitioned then heads have to move more when doing read+write between partitions. but this is not something I can "prove". I haven't conducted any tests myself to measure this. I'm not even sure how one would go about setting up an accurate test for this.

I'm more worried about long slow seeks when items are allowed to be placed on the farthest tracks.

Short stroking a drive can definitely improve performance.

Keeping static files on another partition might be perfect strategy.

How well are writes using out of order writes.
The home folder library prefs and system are constantly reading and writing.
How poor or well is OS X optimizing directories? Not great but there are hot list etc.

If you want to do something, I say, "Do it" and learn for yourself though.

Ideal is to have home folder though on another physical drive, which is also very easy.

If you may want to erase and restore the system, isolating it is better than relying on TimeMachine restores.

not really. it might be quicker to do a restore when the system is on a separate partition but the end result si the same. and how often do you need to do a system restore like that?

I have an SSD drive I want to use strictly as a boot / system drive. User files need to be elsewhere and given the limitations and advantages of SSD I consider that good enough reason.

So if one can move the /Users directory to another mount point, how does one go about that?

(not wanting to prompt another discussion about drive methods here)

Thanks in advance!

See this post:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10937189&#10937189