Redirecting "home" folders to external drive

Just so you know, this will really slow down access to files in your home directory, including all the various databases, caches, etc. in various hidden folders.

I just don’t get it. For almost 10 years Apple sold a bunch of minis and iMacs with horribly slow hard drives. Most of those people are still using those drives, totally unaware of how much faster a modern computer would be.

Yet so many of those people who have those modern computers with super-fast SSDs are trying everything they can to run from slower hard drives.

I don’t get it.

Almost everything that takes up large amounts of storage can be redirected to an external, Movies, Photos, TV, Music, etc.

Documents are easily stored on an external without having to move the home folder or redirect the Documents folder.

The biggest external SSD I can find is only 4 TB. I did find an external M.2 RAID that supports up to 32 TB. Technically speaking, those are “a fraction” of the price that Apple charges. But that “fraction” is about 80%. You aren’t saving that much money. Plus, your “super fast” SSD is going to be, at best, 25-50% the speed of Apple’s internal. You make up the difference with hassles like this and flaky USB bus. I would be shocked if you were using Thunderbolt.

Anyway, that link that Barney-15E posted is what you want to follow. It tells you where to set the location of your home directory. That’s the key part. You have to make sure to have a normal, admin user setup with the home directory on the internal. Log out of your user and log in to this failsafe user to make those changes. Plus, when your external flakes out, you’ll still have this failsafe to log in with and hopefully recover your data.

Don’t make any symbolic links. Just set the home directory. That’s the UNIX way. You will have to make sure to format the external as APFS. And make sure to enable ownership on the volume. Otherwise, certain flaky 3rd party tools won’t work. While logged out, and logged in to your failsafe, copy your home directory to the external. Then change the home directory. Then you can log in to the new user.

Enjoy your top-of-the line, half speed computer.

But do you really need 8 TB of data for your home directory? There is nothing wrong with adding external storage. It works fine. You just don't need to move your home directory.

Also, your comparison isn't fair. You can only move your home directory to a single external drive. You might be able to cobble something together with fstab, but you have to be careful with that. When dealing with externals, you always have to be prepared to run when the external isn't connected and/or is dead or not functional for some reason. So you can't compare an internal 8 TB to an external 4 TB. An internal 4 TB is only $1200.

And you aren't sacrificing a little in speed. You are sacrificing a lot. The only 4 TB SSDs I can find in that price range are very cheap ones. You might not even get the speed they advertise. When dealing with externals, your speed is the speed of the slowest link. That isn't a PCIE SSD. Once you hook it up to USB, it's just USB. Advertising likes to advertise the theoretical speed of the storage device rather than the real-world speed of the included USB interface. Those externals will be 10-20% the speed of the internal.

By purchasing the Mac Studio, you've already spent the extra money for this performance. Now, you are spending even more money to reduce that performance. Just use those drives as regular external drives for backups, archives, etc. You will have a much, much better experience that way.

See this article: Change the name of your macOS user account and home folder - Apple Support

etresoft wrote:

I don’t get it.

+1