Optimal configuration for MacBook with small SSD and big HDD? I am looking for an optimal configuration for a MacBook Pro that was converted to have two disks: primary one one SSD of around 100-200 GB and second one of 500-750 GB (the original drive that was moved to the DVD bay).

Objectives:


Maximize battery life - the secondary HDD should be used in such way that the OS will use power management on the disk.
Keep big files that do not need fast access to the HDD, this includes: pictures, music (iTunes), movies, downloads. 


So, what mounts should be made and how?
I have this kind of setup in my Mac mini, 120 Gb SSD, 320 Gb HDD. Instead of doing mounts or messing with the location of the home folder I decided to just link the "heavy folders" back to their location on the HDD :

$ ls -l
total 1304
drwxr-xr-x  17 tyr   admin     578 Apr 17 01:51 Applications
drwx------+  6 tyr   staff     204 Apr 21 20:20 Desktop
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  staff      35 Dec 31 08:15 Documents -&gt; /Volumes/MiniHD/Users/tyr/Documents
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  staff      35 Dec 31 08:19 Downloads -&gt; /Volumes/MiniHD/Users/tyr/Downloads
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  staff      33 Mar 18 16:11 Dropbox -&gt; /Volumes/MiniHD/Users/tyr/Dropbox
drwx------@ 56 tyr   staff    1904 Apr 18 03:49 Library
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  staff      32 Dec 31 08:19 Movies -&gt; /Volumes/MiniHD/Users/tyr/Movies
drwx------+  6 tyr   staff     204 Feb 19 04:35 Music
drwx------+ 25 tyr   staff     850 Apr 21 16:24 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+ 88 tyr   staff    2992 Apr  8 11:17 Public
drwxr-xr-x+  3 tyr   staff     102 Dec 31 08:02 Sites
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  staff      41 Dec 31 08:30 VirtualMachines -&gt; /Volumes/MiniHD/Users/tyr/VirtualMachines
drwxr-xr-x@  2 tyr   staff      68 Jan 11 19:51 dwhelper
drwxr-xr-x   2 tyr   staff      68 Dec 31 08:54 lf5


I've had this setup for a couple of months now and have not had any problems with it.
2 folders are not linked : "Music" and "Pictures" because I've changed the location of the music and pictures in iTunes and iPhoto respectively. For iTunes this allows me to keep the metadata (the iTunes "db") on the SSD where it is fastest.