I am organizing my external HD and want to move files NOT COPY them. How do I drag and drop folder contents without Mac automatically copying them to the "drop" location?

I am sorting out all the clutter and duplicate files on my external HD. In doing this I am moving the entire contents of folders to new locations. Some of these folders cointain gigs of info. I do not want to have to spend large amounts of time waiting for hundreds of gigs to copy somewhere then  moving the originals to the trash and wait even longer deleting all of them. All I want to do is move the files up a subfolder, but the way Finder goes aobut doing it can be a 400 GB swing taking hours. How do I just "move" them?

Check out this discussion. Worked for me.
http://tinyurl.com/7dmh9p5
Quote:
When I do a drag and drop in Finder to move a folder into another folder it makes a copy of the folder in the new location instead of moving it like the help documentation says and like it used to do in Snow Leopard.  I have looked all over in preferences for a setting the contols the move/copy outcome of drag and drop and have been unable to find anything.  Is this the way Lion is supposed to work?
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.1)
This solved my question by jsd2  on Oct 9, 2011 6:33 AM
I did a global change of permissions for the entire documents account in the currrent user account using the get info and apply to enclosed items.
I think what is happening is that the Documents folder normally carries an "everyone deny delete" ACL, meant to protect it from accidental deletion:
$ ls -lde ~/Documents
drwx------+ 6 t1  staff  204 Oct  9 08:51 /Users/t1/Documents
0: group:everyone deny delete
ACLs are special types of permissions that do not show up in GetInfo, but can get propagated if you click "Apply to Enclosed Items" on a folder that carries them. Affected files that acquire  that ACL would require password authentication to move or delete them.
I think the following Terminal command (copy and paste it) should remove such ACLs from items within the Documents  folder:
chmod -RN ~/Documents/*
Message was edited by: miz_mdk

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