Adding an Optibay SSD from OWC...

Hey all,

Just wondering what the best way to accomplish this...

I have a nice 500 GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive as my main boot drive right now. What I want to do is get an optibay type thingy from OWC, and put in one of their 3G 60 GB SSD's in the optical drive's location. I would like to make that my boot drive, as well as the location of my "Home" folder (and Applications so that they can start up faster), but I want my Music to be located on the 500 GB Seagate, as I have recently become a neo-computer audiophile, with everything in my library now in AIFF format. I use Amarra and BitPerfect as well, but that's an aside.

I have a 1 TB external to work with. My thinking is move all the Music, Movies, Photos, Documents, TV Shows, Applications -- basically all my data I want to save -- in a folder on the external. Then I can reformat the 500 GB XT and be ready to put Music back on that one (since it'll be my 2nd/internal/music drive). I would then clean install Lion on the SSD. I could then put maybe my Documents/Photos/other personal folders on the SSD, and keep Movies and TV Shows on the external.

Notes: i would rather not restore from a Time Machine backup as it would take forever, even over ethernet (well maybe like 8 hours or so).

Questions:
1. What is the best way to make sure that all my "On My Mac" folders in Mail.app get transferred (as well as their contents lol), and also my iCal calendars that are not publishable/synced with Google.

2. What is the best way to make sure all the 'other' folders that applications put on the hard drive get transferred over too? I mean, just copying the Application may not be enough, right? Some programs seem to store ancillary folders with licenses, etc. I don't want have to re-hunt all those down.

3. It should be possible to "BootCamp" the 500 GB (non-boot) drive, right?

4. This is kind of the important one: is 60 enough space to take advantage of the whole SSD thing? For instance i'd like to get a Blu-ray ripper and hook it up (via USB2...don't have FW800) and first rip the data to a HD, then use HandBrake to convert that to an mkv/m4v -- something smaller than 50 GB lol. Would it be more advantageous to be able to do that stuff on the SSD? Or will the "bottleneck" as far as HandBrake is concerned be the BD ripping drive's speed? After data is on one of the HD's, it's then up to my CPU and the HD speed to do the rest, right? There's a $80 price differential between the 60 GB and 120 GB SSD, but maybe it's worth it to get the bigger one, for this purpose at least?

Thanks for your help!

 

Hmm...

So i guess one can't "bump" threads in this forum. Seems kind of stupid, and seriously detrimental if you post a thread early in the morning -- when no one will see it -- and later you want to call everyone's attention to it for discussion. :/ whatev's! This is the first forum that has had such a practice. Note that I am not openly arguing with the forum rules, so I don't think this portion of my post will be inflammatory. (I hope it does not come off that way.)

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I'll forego my previous "anyone?" bump an instead try to re-phrase some of my questions so that someone might be able to help me.

I saw this page, which kind of outlines some of the folders that one would want to copy over to the SSD after the clean install.

1. I am just curious whether there are any other folders that article leaves out.

2. I am curious whether 60 GB is enough space for the 'boot' [SSD] drive that i want to place in the optical bay's space. The reason i ask is because i would like to rip Blu-rays to either the SSD or HDD and then use Handbrake to conver them to a smaller file (say, ~10 GB max). I am wondering if 60 GB is enough space to house the home folder, applications, and the ripped BD data for processing. Or is 60 too small for all that? Moreover, is ripping to a HDD sufficient for processing, or will ripping it to a SSD be much faster as far the HandBrake conversion is concerned? I figure the bottleneck in the HandBrake conversion process will be my CPU, more-so than the HD type or RAM.

Thanks. Hopefully someone sees this!

 

Nice! Thanks for the reply. I also realized that one can use the "User Accounts" preference pane and have OS X point the home directory to a new place, like the HDD. I'll just keep the SSD for OS and Apps.