NVME drive boot question

[PP Mguire]

In the manual, the block diagram does say SATA 2.

Those aren't SATA 2 speeds, so definitely bottlenecked.

The SATA SSD will be kept as MBR so that I can still boot in the event something happens to the NVME drive or thumb drive with the bootloader on it.

Cloning the UEFI GPT based drive to the MBR based drive expecting AMI isn't going to work. You'll need UEFI for both to just use one or the other if you want, and it'll require your bootloader USB at all times.

So using Macrium Reflect I can tell it to just backup the Windows partition of the NVME drive to the Windows partition of the SATA drive and still be able to boot from the SATA drive if needed?

No it'll create a backup image of your boot drive to the SATA SSD. If something did happen to the NVMe drive you'd need to boot into a Macrium Reflect USB drive and tell it to restore the image. What you're wanting is cloning which won't be possible with how you want to implement the setup, or basically a shadow copy if you will as redundancy.

 

[ikonix360]

So basicslly it isn't possible for a program to scan the windows partition of the NVME drive for changes and make the same changes to the windows partition on the SATA drive and still have it boot properly from the SATA drive if needed?

 

[ikonix360]

What I might do is this.

I can set the BIOS to boot from USB by default which I think is how it may already be set. So I can plug the SATA drive back in and it won't boot to it unless it can't use the bootloader for some reason.

I'll look at MiniTool partition wizard and see if it is possible to copy the Windows partition from the NVME drive to the SATA drive while leaving the rest of the partitions on the SATA drive intact.

I'll then see if it will properly boot from the SATA drive.

Of course if I clone the drive I can set it to be a NTFS disk I think just like I was able to set the NVME drive as a GPT drive when cloning the SATA drive to it so maybe that's my only solution and would have to be something I do perhaps once a week or so.

I don't expect the NVME drive to fail anytime soon, but I'm not fond of my data depending on a USB thumb drive to load a bootloader every time I boot my system. Plus it ties up a thumb drive.

Maybe I'll see if it's possible to put the bootloader on the 1 TB hard drive as it's a quality Seagate that I don't expect to fail anytime soon.