SSD, II
Some thoughts on successfully configuring a working dual-drive system.
Last weekend, following my utter failure the previous weekend, I returned to the problem of configuring my laptop to have two drives: an SSD along side its original spinning rust.
There's no clear evidence that doing so will significantly decrease the amount of time that my regular “big compile” takes, I just don't like to lose.
On my first attempt, I started with the idea that I'd make the whole thing transparent by mounting the spinning rust bits on top of the SSD in various places. That didn't work for a couple of reasons. I fell back to using symbolic links to fake it. That doesn't really work either. Before long, I'd tangled myself up so completely that I just pulled the rip cord and restored from backup.
The second time around, I started with less ambitious goals. I accepted the fact that I wouldn't be able to make the new configuration transparent. I planned to configure the machine so that I could boot off the SSD and login with no dependencies on the spinning rust.
Having accepted those terms, I tried to limit the number of symbolic
links created. No mapping /projects
→/Volumes/Data/projects
, etc. As I find scripts and configurations that depend on
/projects
and other changed locations,
I update them to point explicitly to the new locations.
I do have a few symbolic links, mostly to satisfy programs that
think they know where data should be or as a convenience to point to
directories that contain large amounts of data (for cryin' out loud,
there's 10Gb of data under ~/Music/iTunes
and don't
get me started about ~/Library/Application Support/Steam
).
All and all, it's now running quite smoothly. As Jacek mentioned in a comment on the previous post, the most noticable speed increase is in the little things. Booting is almost instantaneous. Even big applications start in a second or two. The machine is quieter too, which is nice. The spinning rust spins down when it's not in use and the SSD of course is utterly silent.
I don't mind being an outlier, and I like to tinker, so I think it was worth it, but it's not the sort of thing I could recommend to everyone.