How to slice up my boot drive for optimum performance?

Any perceived performance increase will likely be a placebo effect
I don't believe there will truly be any measurable difference in doing what you are suggesting

 

I can't think of any reason, unless your boot drive doesn't have enough space (e.g. you use a smaller SSD). And in the case of user files I think relocating your home directory away from /Users is probably more trouble than it's worth.

 

i have 1tb drive and have my apps and osx as well as my music on it

 

Considering that the outer platter sectors are considerably faster than the inner ones, a boot partition on these sectors might well be worth it.

However, I'd rather create a stripe array out of the two Blacks, as it gives you 200MB/s read and write.

 

Rather than separating the drives, why not leave your folders intact and setup a RAID 0?

 

That's not necessarily a great solution for everyone, since the improved performance of a striped array also comes with added risk. Instead of a single point of failure using a normal disk, you have three points of possible failure. You should always have a disaster recovery strategy, but that's especially true with striped disks.

 

At the very least I'ld put a small [3-10gb] partition at the beginning of the data drive and put a minimal parallel install on it just to be safe.
Hey, you never know.
In tiger, I sometimes put swap, os, apps, home, and os 9 or linux in that order on the boot drive. And then put a small rescue partition at the beginning of the data drive.
Yea, I know - alittle crazy.

 

Soon is *ALWAYS* too late.

RAID 0 is pretty useless for what you are doing. RAID 0 is very good for video work, and hardly worth it for photo work. Access time and transfer rates are what we need here. SSDs would blaze along.

I have a 40D and a 40k Image library and my setup is thus:

Internally:

300Gb Velociraptor
Partition 1 (Macintosh HD 1): OS X + Lightroom Library
Partition 2: Windows 7 Bootcamp

1Tb WD Black
Partition 1 (Macintosh HD 2.1): Photo library (550Gb)
Partition 2 (Macintosh HD 2.2): Home folder (450Gb) (Music, documents, etc).

1Tb WD Black
Partition 1 (Macintosh HD 3): Timemachine (1000Gb)

1.5Tb Samsung HDxxx
Partition 1 (Macintosh HD 4): Videos for streaming to PS3 (1500Gb)

And then, externally:
1Tb MyBook Studio
Partition 1 (Macintosh HD 5): Backups of Macintosh HD 1, 2.1 and 2.2

500Gb WD USB thingy
Partition 1 (Macintosh HD 6): Offsite backup of HD 2.1 which is updated from HD 5 when im at home.

 

If they are on the same physical hard drive, no.