Make macbook store apps on one hard drive and data on another I just replaced my optical drive in my 2010 macbook pro 15 inch with my old 500GB hard drive that used to be in the HDD bay and placed a new SSD in the HDD bay. Now i have 256  GB of SSD storage which i would like to use for only my operating system and applications.

The rest of the data (music, movies, text files, pdfs, etc) i would like to be stored on my other Hard drive.

I reformatted both hard dives to be Mac OS X Extended (journaled) and am currently installing the SSD with OS X Yosemite.

How do I tell my mac that i want to install apps on the SSD but storing music and other stuff should be done on my HDD (which now is in the optical bay).
Copy your home directory over to the other drive.
Open up System Preferences then the Users &amp; Groups pane.
Click the padlock to unlock it
Right-click on your name
Change the Home Directory to point to your newly copied one on the other drive.


NB. You might want to use a syncing program to do the copy, or create a different user to do the copy as after rebooting so that your original user isn't logged in and running anything. Makes the copy cleaner.

If you want to do this with a brand-new user, so much the better.

Alternatively, you can use your existing home directory and just sym-link everything over...

Select the folders in Finder on the new drive - ctrl-L (File menu -> Create Alias), then drag the aliases to the old drive and remove the old originals. This is less neat, but works just fine.