Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:
. . .
Your point about Setup/Migration Assistant not being able to help is an interesting one. When the Users folder is not with the boot Drive, you can wipe the Boot Drive and never lose the Users information, making the need for those assistants less important (and a good general purpose Backup and RESTORE System more important).
Only if you're careful. The actual user accounts are buried deep in /private, on the OSX drive. Without them, Setup/Migration Assistant can't associate home folders with user accounts. So you must create an Admin account on the OSX drive, then create each "real" user account, which will automatically create a home folder on the OSX drive. Then you must point the account to the "real" home folder on the other drive. Not hard, but a bit tedious, and absolutely mystifying if you don't know about it, and plan for it, first.
The automatic defragmentation of files being limited to the Boot Drive is a new idea to me, and will need further research. I had blithely assumed that ALL files over 20 MB were being optimized when opened, not just those on the Boot Drive. The issue of Optimization of file placement will need another look as well.
That's my understanding from some posts by what I think are knowledgeable users, but I've never seen an "official" Apple support article that confirms it. I'm also not sure how important it is -- in some situations, it may not matter much, if at all.
And it's files under 20 MB. The Support article used to say that, but the "streamlined" version no longer does.
As for User-Files-on-Server, it can be very nearly (but not quite) as fast as files on the local computer. Apple Education urges anyone using this Server setup to establish a GigaBit Ethernet network, and this provides "near-Hard-Drive" file access times for most Network Users' files.
I wonder. My now-elderly 2009 iMac shows a theoretical 3 GB speed for my SATA link. I realize that's kinda like brake horsepower on a car -- you can't get it all to the road, and is further limited by the actual disk seek time, but then I suspect Gigibit Ethernet is similar. I have no experience with SSDs, but they're much faster than rotational HDs, right?
User Caches on the Server can get stupid, so there is a supported mechanism for automatically creating caches on the local Boot Drive, placing them and Linking to a protected folder with the Username in /private/tmp so that the previous User's caches will be guaranteed to be gone by the time the next user logs in.
Ah, cool!
And it may well make more sense in the Server environment you describe. That wasn't part of the original question, and since I know very little about the Server products, so wasn't considering it.