Putting one user's Home folder on an external drive?

[Loa]

Hello,

As things stand right now, I have a SSD boot volume with everything but the User folders on it. Both my Users are on an internal RAID0.

I know I could move one of those users to an external drive, but would it cause problems during the times when that external drive won't be mounted?

Thanks

Loa

 

[zorinlynx]

Why do you want to have your home directories on an external drive?

If anything, they should be on the SSD, and bulk data should manually be located on the external storage. This allows you to have amazing SSD performance for stuff like your Library folder which is used by nearly every app for configuration and temporary data.

You can create symbolic links to put your iTunes library and other huge stuff on the external volumes.

 

[Loa]

Hello,

I know all that: it's exactly the set-up I have right now and it's why I described it in my post.

Unless I can find the cash a huge SSD, I need to find compromises. The user I want to "move out" is rarely used, and wouldn't really benefit from the SSD anyway.

I need to put roughly 150GB-175GB of RAW files on the SSD, as well as a 25GB-28GB iPhoto Library, at minimum, with room to grow. My iTunes library (another 175GB) is already off my current SSD, and will remain so as I don't need the speed for that.

I'm trying to see if I can manage with a 256GB SSD instead of shelling out for a 512GB.

Loa