>>> Now I have one more question, and this is for Fred or Stan. Should any physical directories named Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Video, etc., remain on the actual /home mount?

>> My process was to mkdir on the new drive, delete the old directory in /home/user and when I created the link the directory was visible in the /home/user just writing to somewhere else.

> What you do, or at least what I did, was leave the actual directories where they are, but edit fstab so that your new partitions are mounted there.

Does seem cleaner; but, I assume you are creating a partition for each directory?  And fstab could be saved and at worse used for reference in new build.

At the end of the day the strength of Linux is the options it affords for your specific needs.  Pros/Cons to all the great ideas listed here and the beauty is, if setup right, you can try them all.. the data, as is the point, is sitting snugly off to the side.