I recently had a 120GB SSD hard drive installed in my iMac to use in conjunction with the 1TB hard drive that came with it. The goal was to improve the speed of the system by using the SSD as a boot disk and store all user data (user_home_) on the 1TB hard drive (hereinafter I will refer to it as “secondary”). The steps are as follows.
Create the new user folder
The first thing we need to do is create the user folder on the secondary hard drive. It must have the same name as the user folder on the boot disk.
Create an exact copy of the files
Next we must create an exact copy of the files from the original user folder in the new folder that we have created on the secondary hard drive. To do this, we will use the ditto command in the terminal, which will create an exact copy:
sudo ditto -rsrc ORIGEN DESTINOIn my case it would look like this:
sudo ditto -rsrc /Users/rene /Volumes/MacintoshHD/rene/(To get the paths correctly, we can simply drag each of the folders from the Finder.)
Update Mac OS X settings
Once this is done, we will have a copy of the files made, including the correct read and write permissions. Now we will have to tell the system that the location of the user folder has changed. To do this we will access “System Preferences”, “Users and Groups”. Once there we will right click on the user we want to modify and choose “Advanced Options”. In the window that opens we will only have to modify the line “Home directory” by selecting the location that we have previously created.
Once this is done, we will reboot and we will have moved our user’s Home directory to the secondary hard drive. Once we verify that everything has worked correctly, we can delete the original user folder.