Seems like most cautions in this Topic (about placing one’s Home directory on a drive other than the System drive) have mentioned problems related only to placing it on an external drive. However, perhaps these cautions also apply to Home directories on internal drives that are not the System drive.
My ancient iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) running macOS 12.7.1 Monterey has two internal drives because it is from the Fusion Drive era. Long, long ago I decoupled the Fusion Drive into its two components, a small SSD and a much larger HDD. I installed the operating system and applications on the SSD. From this System, I created two administrative users and one of them used a symbolic link to place its Home directory on the HDD. Over the years, through several operating system upgrades and a few HDD replacements, this configuration worked perfectly.
At some point, I had the impression that Apple supported having one’s Home and System on two different drives since it could be created via the Advanced Options GUI:
Recently DriveDx indicated that my 6 TB internal HDD was failing and I replaced it with a 8 TB SSD.
Unfortunately, I’m now having a number of minor problems with my iMac and perhaps the root problem is that my Home and System are on two different internal drives.
How should I put a System on (and move my applications to) my 8 TB SSD so that everything is on the same (internal) drive?
Thank you.
UPDATE December 12, 2023 10:56 PM
@kineyd9Tpurduol
Disk Utility recognizes/categories both my SSDs as “Internal” as shown in this screenshot:
The disk listed under the label “External” is indeed an external drive connected by USB-A at 5Gbps.
The external vs internal distinction is corroberated by → About This Mac … → System Report …
