Change location of Safari Bookmarks?

[rotarypower101]

I am guessing this is fairly easy, but how can I store my Safari Bookmarks on my SSD, but keep my Library Folder on a large mechanical hard drive?

When making bookmarks in safari, it always lags really bad, and I think/hope that holding them on the SSD may help with the indexing and seek/write times (I really dont know where the real issue lies, and yes I understand how small the files are, but it does not work correctly presently, as there are a lot presumably)

The OS is running on a SSD, but I also have a large mechanical HD running the Users/Library Folder.

What must I do to have the Users/Library/Safari Folder that resides on the mechanical HD move to the SSD?

My Users Folder on the mechanical HD is ~1.09TB
The OS is on a SSD ~60 GB

So I cannot just move the Users Folder back to the OS drive.

What is required to have my Safari bookmarks on the SSD?

Is this request clear?

TIA!

 

[benwiggy]

I would suggest that if there is any sort of delay or hold-up in saving Bookmarks, that this is not merely due to using an HDD -- assuming it's not having to spin up, which wouldn't seem likely if your whole user Library is there.
Have you verified your HDD?

Have you moved the whole User account, or just the Library? I presume you moved the whole user account using the Advanced options in System Preferences > User & Groups. You can use Unix symbolic links to change locations, though there can be problems with this. Essentially, you create a link, a bit like an alias, in the place of the Bookmarks folder/file, to its true location on the SSD. The filesystem will treat them identically.

However -- have you considered creating a Fusion drive from your SSD and HDD? That way, you could put your Library back in the correct place, and let the OS work out where to put your files. It can be much more efficient, as it can move files -- or rather blocks of files -- between the drives while keeping the file hierarchy intact.

Currently, the HDD is still likely to be a bottleneck for you, as the system will be constantly accessing the user Library and whatever else you have on the HDD.

 

[rotarypower101]

Thanks Ben, you are on the exact same page as me, you covered every solution I was thinking about.

Verified via disk utility?
Yes
“The volume Macintosh SSD appears to be OK.“
“The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK”

The entire user account had been moved to the mechanical 7200RPM 3 TB HD.
It seemed like a less confusing solution for future maintenance.
Though I really wanted to pick and choose initially, but other than the Bookmarks issue, I can deal with everything else that would/could benefit from the SSD speed presently.

Its just that I am a "collector" of topics and links, because I constantly come back to them for reference, they are very organized and clearly labeled, so its not just a huge mess.
But I use this specific function A LOT! And it consistantly “pinwheels” stalls out Safari for up to 30-40 seconds if I make a new bookmark or modify the title and description of the bookmark. (that just seems really wrong) I see no other side effects that would lead me to believe something is amiss, just this one single piece of functionality.

It may seem silly, but it really is a hindrance, and I would love to actively work on a solution/fix/bandaid.

I think it is simple enough that it should be fixable.


I am strongly thinking about moving to a fusion drive, just have not done my research as to the pros/cons, and as my current system works pretty good, I thought it prudent to let the details shake out for a while before moving in this direction, as I did with “trim”

Have you any experience with “fusion drive” any good links to share?
This would be for a early 2008 macpro on 10.7

It may be time to explore this option in greater detail...

The mechanical unit is a bottleneck, but for the items it contains it really has been all but transparent in its operation, no complaints worth moaning about.

Well except for the Bookmarks of course, its just I do utilize this function extensively, so for me having that ~1min dead wait time is excruciating when it happens so often.

 

[benwiggy]

I am strongly thinking about moving to a fusion drive, just have not done my research as to the pros/cons, and as my current system works pretty good, I thought it prudent to let the details shake out for a while before moving in this direction, as I did with “trim”

Have you any experience with “fusion drive” any good links to share?
This would be for a early 2008 macpro on 10.7

There are plenty of pages detailing how to create a fusion drive from a setup such as yours. It's basically just a special partitioning.

I have a 2012 MacMini with Fusion built-in. As I said, it intelligently moves file blocks (sub-file units), so that you keep the most used blocks on the SSD. This means that a large group of files that have to be in the same folder could only have some files on the SSD, which is very clever.

The only down side is that if either hardware fails, you lose the drive, but then that could happen to either drive in any case, and that's why we have backups.

One last thing would be to check the Console, to see what log messages are left while you get the beachball when saving Bookmarks.