Concerning using two drives in a MacBook Pro

Yeas I had already selected the SSD as the startup Disk and I had also renamed the old HDD, before asking this question. It didn't help...

Now I re-selected the SSD as the start up because it crossed my mind that I had selected but left the window unlocked and that maybe have some significance. I locked it and I erased the Hdd successfully.

However, the sidebar shows this hierarchy:

the device on the top is the name of my old Hard drive. I am sure I am missing something here.

And by the way, Spotlight does find folders and files on the SSD. Works fine.

Please ignore the question in the second reply above (10:56 PM). Everything does work as it is, I think. Most probably, the problem was the unlocked window in the System Preferences.

And I have to say that the speed of this new disk is beyond my expectations! Thank you for your replies.

Dear Duane, thank you. I know. Actually I wrote my reply too fast but couldn't edit or delete it for some reason, that is why I sent another reply asking to ignore that point.

In fact, everything works really fine. I have new questions about other things, for instance, if I can place the ~/Library on the second disk with a symbolic link on the start up disk, but it is perhaps more appropriate to ask this question in a separate post.

So far at the beginning, it is fast and my MBP has got a new life. The stability of SSD, compared to HD,remains to be examined…

I read about SSD being sensitive to much writing and re-writing. Library contains files that are often modified (specially Mail is a good candidate), so I figured out it'd better to add Library or at least ~/Library/Mail to the HDD and create a link (Alias) on the SSD. This said, Library in the Home folder has some new features in terms of permissions (it is since Lion invisible if you don't change the flagging). So I am unsure if this is a good idea. Any suggestion?

On this point you seem to be right and I misled by some excessive cautious attitude towards a technology that is still relatively new (mass implementation is not longer than three years and the new and more voluminous ones, like mine (500gb), are even newer). I just want to treat it in a way that doesn't wear it off too fast. But my concerns are admittedly illogical. What else should I then think about using Solid State compared to a HDD? What about TRIM and what about fragmentation?

Dear Duane

Thanks for your reply.

For SSD and the issue of writing and re-writing, I quote Wikipedia (perhaps not the most reliable reference and it is a quite general statement):

"An SSD write operation can be done on a single page but, due to hardware limitations, erase commands always affect entire blocks;^[10] consequently writing data to empty pages on an SSD is very fast, but slows down considerably once previously written pages need to be overwritten."

The same source says the following about TRIM:

"Although the AHCI block device driver gained the ability to display whether a device supports the Trim operation in 10.6.6 (10J3210),^[32] the functionality itself remained inaccessible until 10.6.8, when the Trim operation was exposed via the IOStorageFamily and filesystem (HFS+) support was added.^{[citation needed]} Until 10.10.4, Mac OS X natively enabled Trim only for Apple-branded SSDs; third-party utilities are available to enable it for other brands. Old third party TRIM drivers stopped working as of the Yosemite update.^[33] Updated drivers now exist that work with OS X Yosemite.^[34][35] In Mac OS X update 10.10.4, Apple added a command line utility, trimforce, that can be used to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs"

I am working in Lion (10.7.5), and the quotation seems to support what you are saying even though the information provided is too brief and sketchy.

Couldn't find much Macosx specific information on the net about fragmentation.