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phew, installed cheap optibay without any problems

H

happle

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 20, 2010
501
0
just got done installing a amazon optibay. it has all positive reviews and was only 20 bucks shipped. it fit like a charm, although was actually a tad tight going in. i had a few close calls with almost losing some screws but all went well. not too hard as long as your careful and have proper lighting.

sucks though because I'm going to have to do the job again pretty soon when i get a new HDD. right now i just threw in my 250gb 5400rpm toshiba drive from a 2009-2010 macbook to hold my music and such. i don't really want to mess with it again, but i guess i know what I'm doing now so it shouldn't be as bad. so far the 5400 rpm drive is silent, heat, and vibration free in the fake optibay.

any recommendations for the optibay drive? like power settings/sleep settings and what have you? also what folders are you guys keeping on the ssd and what on the hdd? like for iTunes do i keep everything but my actual music files on the ssd and the music files on the hdd? what about for iPhoto and such. any help is appreciated.
 
got iTunes working good by putting everything but iTunes media in the actual iTunes folder and then just directing iTunes to my hdd for the media folder. still not sure how to get photo booth to go to the hdd but i got iPhoto working.

as it is now i have all user data on the ssd and just my music, pics, movies, samples, documents, etc on the hdd. i only have 30gb on the ssd right now and its 128gb so id rather leave as much of the system files on there as i can.
 
Just move your entire user folder to the 2nd HDD and leave the OS and Applications on the SSD.

Search on how this is done properly before just moving it, though, it's not as simple as just moving your user folder.
 
iThinkergoiMac said:
Just move your entire user folder to the 2nd HDD and leave the OS and Applications on the SSD.

Search on how this is done properly before just moving it, though, it's not as simple as just moving your user folder.
Click to expand...

i don't see the need. like i said i have only 30gb on the ssd. i might as well use as much of it as i can. i really just don't want my music, docs, samples, movies, etc on there. i just made separate folders on the hdd for those and told my programs where to go and left the actual user music etc folder empty...i don't see a problem with this and that way if i ever need to swap out the hdd the system is still stable and working on the ssd.
 
You wanted to know how to get PhotoBooth to point to your HDD, not your SSD. Moving your user folder would do that. Or create an alias of your Pictures folder and move that to the HDD.
 
I would do it with aliases. Moving the whole User folder is maybe not such a great idea, because that's where the system the system writes and reads cache and temporary information, and you don't want to slow that down.
 
happle said:
in the fake optibay.
Click to expand...
It is no fake optibay. It probably comes from the same factories as all the other others. They produce the stuff in china for something like 2$ and ship it everywhere. Some idiots in the US just pay MCE 99 bucks for something that is worth a tenth of that price.
And the name optibay is not an invention of MCE/OWC either. That was Lenovo/IBM I think.

I also agree moving the entire user folder somewhat defeats the purpose. I try to keep all working data on the SSD. Putting my documents folder with all the working data on the hdd would keep everything as slow as it was. Once the programming suite is loaded in ram there wouldn't be any benefit. With all files on the ssd it speeds many more operations up quite a bit. Only sequential and really big stuff goes hdd like movies, music and some big picture libraries. I split the pictures with iphotolibrarymanager. Archived less likely accessed stuff in a big hdd lib and more often used newer/current stuff on the ssd for quick load/scroll everything.

The "folders" in the Users folder with the nice special icons like picutres, movies are actually just symbolic links. You can just overwrite them with the same name but pointing to a different location.
Just type "man ln" into the terminal if you need instructions.
 
dusk007 said:
It is no fake optibay. It probably comes from the same factories as all the other others. They produce the stuff in china for something like 2$ and ship it everywhere. Some idiots in the US just pay MCE 99 bucks for something that is worth a tenth of that price.
Click to expand...

1x4GB of RAM is also $2 from the chinese factory. Just saying.
 
^ alright thanks for the input guys. i don't see any problem with how i have my computer set up though. like i said i just left all of the user folders alone and on my hdd created my own music, pictures, movies, documents, etc folders and told my programs to go there for the data but kept all the program data on the ssd. then i just dragged and dropped my documents folder from the hdd onto the dock. i have 3gb of school documents. i don't really see a need to put those on the ssd since they mostly won't be in use and i don't need that much speed when doing simple word and ppt docs.
 
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