Ssd and the Mac App Store

Question

I have an ssd for my boot disk and keep everything else (including my home dir) on a separate hdd. The only applications I keep on the ssd are the OS X applications (in /Applications) and my own "key" applications (which I place in a separate directory on the ssd).
As I understand it (based on reading since I haven't updated to 10.6.6) downloads from the App store go directly into the /Applications folder. The way I control my system (a) I download all stuff to my ~/Downloads directory, (b) test out the new download to decide whether it has problems and whether I want to keep it, and (c) I decide where I want to put it and whether to get rid of the previous version if the download is an update.
Now of course I have backups so keeping previous versions is always available. But I don't like the idea of this app store stuff downloading directly into /Applications which is my ssd. It's an ssd, an OWC 120GB ssd with the Sandforce controller, but a ssd none the less. So I'm always concerned about needless wear on the ssd.
Comments/Opinions?

Answer 1

I was in a simmilar boat as some of you.  I had bought a 60GB SSD, but my boot drive was currently using 180GB of data, where should i put all that ****? It wasnt gonna be enough to just move my home folder (althought that would have done most of the job).  I looked around online and found symlinks.  Think of symlinks as alias's that are way way more powerful.  Basicly they make the computer think a given file or folder is on the boot drive, where it should be, but in relaity, its on your secoundary drive.  See the link below for more info.  Heres the rather short list of files i moved to my secoundary drive, just to give you guys some ideas:
1. Steam games ~60GB
2. Apple dev documentation 1.4 GB
3. GarageBand libraries 1.4 GB
4. iPhone backup files 7.86 GB
5. iTunes lib ~60GB (you can use itunes to move it instead
6. iPhoto lib ~15GB
7. sleepimage file (this is the file that backs up your ram when you put your mac to sleep, its the same size as yoru RAM) 6GB
now my boot drive is a comfortable 40/60 GB, but most of my homefolder (including the system files that you want to be accessed quickly) are on my SSD, but all the big stuff, is safe on my HDD.  My symlinks didnt break when i cloned from my HDD to my SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner.  All of this is free, and took me under an hour, but save me a boatload by not having to buy a bigger SSD drive.
Hope this answers your questions
http://www.macworld.com/article/153437/2010/08/symlinkservice.html
PS. I have an OWC 60GB 3g drive, it works amazingly fast