Before I Upgrade to Two Internal Drives...

[yetieater]

I have been considering an upgrade to two internal hard drives for my 4 year old MBP for some time now. I would appreciate it if anyone with experience using OS X with two internal drives could chime in.

The machine was previously running OS X 10.6.8 before a botched Lion install brought me to where I am now. I have access to the Boot Camp partition.

Anyways, there is still a good half year's worth of backed up information on my 1TB external HDD, so I imagine that there would be no real problems if I were to, say, scrub the 500GB internal HDD that is currently inside the MBP and do a clean install of Snow Leopard all over again.

This is where my questions about adding a second hard drive come into play:
- I want to mount a 128GB SSD into my MBP
x Is it better to mount it into the SuperDrive bay?
x Would mounting in the SuperDrive bay allow me to wake it from sleep without problems?

- Say I install Snow Leopard onto the new 128GB SSD
x How will my Time Machine restore work in this situation? The backup is over 400GB in size
x Will I be able to have applications (iPhoto, iTunes) on the SSD, while maintaining all of the data (photos, music) on the 500GB HDD?

Thanks in advance, brethren

 

[MacUser2525]

No clue on the drive bay questions for the rest it seem like you will want to move your user account onto the 500gb drive. Now when you restore from backup after new install you should be able to use the option to restore the user account and not the data there which you will have to do manually after the install. Actually now I think about it a little more perhaps a full restore to the 500gb would be the best route to take then new install onto the SSD migrating only the user account to it for first time start up purposes then change the account home drive to the already existing account on the 500gb after the new SSD install. This would allow you to get all the data back onto the 500 with little hassle allowing you to do what is needed for the new smaller space on SSD. Now to change the account location while you are booted from the SSD you would go to system preferences the user account option advanced and change the location to directory on the 500 and reboot for it to take affect. Once you have confirmed in Finder that the 500gb hard drive shows the house icon for your user directory on the 500 you will want to delete the old one on the SSD or what I fell is blatant missed bug will bite you namely it will continue to save all your files into that directory if it exists.