No, this isn't a howto hardware-oriented tutorial for adding more hard disks to a Macintosh computer. What I'm going to cover is what to do after you've added the hard drive(s) to your computer.
Typically, Mac users run out of hard disk space, and they buy a new hard drive, format it, see it on their desktop, and start putting files on this volume instead. While there's nothing really wrong with this approach, there's a lot more useful ways to put your hard drive into use.
Since it's a Unix system, you can mount filesystems into any directory (permissions allowing). What this means is that you can virtually integrate a new hard drive into your existing filesystem, so that you won't even notice it. It's fairly simple, actually.
- Once you've installed your new hard drive and confirmed it's working, you need to draw up some sort of plan as to how you're going to use the disk space. This will become your partition map. To integrate extra hard drive space into your existing filesytem, the partition must be based off of an existing partition. Here are the most common directories you would want to mount from the new hard disk:
- /Applications - where all the system's applications are stored
- /Users - where all the userdata is stored
- /Users/yourname/Music - where your music is stored
- Fire up Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities, select the new hard disk, and go to the 'partition tab'. Now select a partition scheme that has enough partitions for you, and make sure that they're sized appropriately. You'll probably want to use Journaled HFS+ (case insensitive) as the partition types. You can also create an extra partition if you still want an extra volume on your desktop for storing "extra" files.
- Copy all files from the old folders into the new ones. For example, if you're mounting a new /Application folder, copy the contents of /Applications into the new partition that is going to hold the applications.
- Start up Terminal from /Applications/Utilities, and type the following at the prompt:
diskutil list
This lists all the hard drives and partitions on your system. Make sure you write down the identifier for each new partition that you created on the new hard drive, as you'll need them for the next step. - Now enter the following command at the prompt:
sudo nano /etc/fstab
Enter your password when prompted, and then proceed with creating the fstab file. The format for every mount point you want should be:identifier /mount/point hfs rw 1 0
Create a new line in between each mount point. Replace "identifier" and "/mount/point" with the appropriate entries that you want. - Now move the contents of the old folders somewhere else (in case the mounting doesn't work out). Remember, it's only the content -- for example, if you were mounting /Applications, you would have your /Applications folder empty, ready for it to be mounted when you reboot.
- Reboot, and all the partitions should be integrated right into your filesystem.
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