Anyone else keep their Home Folder on an external?

[eoren1]

Way back with my 2011 iMac, I bought an external SSD and booted off of it to gain some speed. The home folder stayed on the internal spinning disk.

When I upgraded to the late 2015 iMac 5K, I used the internal 500GB SSD as my boot drive and bought a Samsung 850 1TB SSD (connected via USB3) to use as my home folder. The boot SSD holds applications as well as the system and some of the library folder (each is about 10gb). I also have a much larger Library folder on the external home directory (175GB). The internal SSD uses 130GB of space; the external about 500GB.

The system seems to work great this way. Just wondering if anyone else has found that this setup works best to keep the super fast internal SSD from getting too full while maintaining good speed for the home folder.

Also, for anyone who has done this, do you know if it is possible to set up another external SSD to boot from (say to run Mojave beta) and then continue to use the same external SSD home folder without the system changing that so it becomes unusable with Sierra/High Sierra?

Thanks!

 

[BrianBaughn]

Your user folder contains a lot of system-related files and folders and one OS's version of these files could be a lot different and probably not be compatible. You probably recall opening Mail after an upgrade and watching the app rebuild the mail database to suit the new system. You'd have to assume the new database wouldn't work with the old macOS version.