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Acronis True Image 2017 & M.2 drives?

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Hi, new (prospective) user here.

  1. Does Acronis True Image 2017 work 100% reliably with M.2 SSDs in NVMe mode?
  2. Where I worked in the past, the System Administrator used to use an earlier version of Acronis True Image to make an image copy of a freshly configured abd patched system which could then be restored in the event of corruption or virus attack. I am currently building a home system from scratch, will the strategy described above still work?

Thanks

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Welcome to these user forums.

Yes, ATIH 2017 does have support for M.2 NVMe SSD drives however you will probably need to create the Windows PE version of the Acronis bootable Rescue Media (on USB stick or CD/DVD) in order to restore a backup of one of these drives in the event that you needed to recover from a problem caused by corruption or malware etc.

ATIH 2017 provides two different types of Rescue Media - the standard media is based on a Linux Kernel and this may not have the necessary device support for all types of M.2 NVMe SSD drives.  The Windows PE media uses the latest Windows 10 ADK which provides a WinRE boot environment that includes most device drivers for these drives, and with WinPE media it is possible to inject additional device drivers should these be needed.

The MVP community have produced a Script which simplifies the process of creating customised WinPE Rescue Media in either 32-bit or 64-bit flavours, and can include additional device drivers etc.  See link in my signature for this.

Ditto to Steve's notes.

FYI if you leave the SATA mode as AHCI for NVME drives, the default Linux media works fine.  however, WinPE is needed to address RAID mode in the bios as NVME drives are typically shipped with SATA set to RAID (even for a 1 drive setup) because NVME drives can take advantage of larger queue depths that are limited by AHCI.  

Does the normaly home user really need those deeper queue depths - in most cases, probably not.  However, if you want the potential for maximum performance of an NVME PCIE hard drive, then the SATA mode should be RAID.  That is when you need WinPE, so you can inject RAID controller drivers in it to support RAID mode in the bios.  The MVP tool includes the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) driver by default and also allows the user user to supply other third party drivers of their own more easily into the build process.  

But if you're using AHCI as the SATA mode, you can use the default Linux media just fine.