Clone a Sampson 951 Pro (Bootable)
I have a Samson SSD 951 Pro that's connected to my M.2 which is on a Asus Rampage V Extreme motherboard. This is my bootable drive. I would like the backup to also be bootable.
If I had a second SSD 950 pro it would be a simple clone operation. But all I will have is a SSD 850 Pro. Here are my thoughts:
1. Clone my SSD 950 Pro to a SSD 850 pro of the approximate same size.
2. Use my cloned 850 Pro and clone it to my newly replaced SSD 950Pro.
That should work. At least I did it the other way. I had first a Samsung 850 pro that was my Windows boot drive. I simply cloned that SSD and to the M.2 950 disk. Asus Z170-PRemium. WIndows booted right away. No issue. So the reverse operation should work just fine.
Make sure you don't leave both disks (ie source & clone) in the system when you reboot.
I know you can make sure that the system is booting on the right disk with the UEFI firmware, but don't try to reboot with both disks inside. You can reconnect the other disk when you have successfully booted on the cloned disk.
I concur with Pat here. Should not be a problem in doing what you propose but as Pat points out, do not attempt first time boot with both drives attached in the machine.
Thank you, Pat L and Enchantech.
Enchantech, have you looked into the possibility of a range zero. Have you had experience with the possibility of an adapter card. From what I hear trying to rain an M.2 950 Pro with the same to a M.2 on the motherboard. Actually, I would not pursue this type of any resolution myself. But if the adapter card had to M.2 connections on an adapter card I might consider a raid zero. But again there seems to be a lot of negative thoughts on that possibility.
Steve I think I will create a bootable image. Since I've gone through all the password issues regarding my new reinstall, finding, reinstalling, settings up programs, I'm sure you know the routine. After 30+ years of the redundancy, I have dedicated myself to a solid backup system.
So thanks to all for the help.
Bob
Bob,
I think your reference to "range zero" is more commonly known as RAID 0. So I take it you are asking if I have considred this, had any experience with this, etc.
The answers to all of the above is yes I have. What I will tell you is that 2 of these M.2 drives such as the 950 Pro will produce speeds up to 4Gbps + which is insanely fast. In your case, having an X99 based board such as the Rampage V Extreme, you can certainly setup an M.2 RAID 0 array however, you will not be able to set this up as a boot volume on your board. At this time the only boards that support M.2 RAID 0 boot volumes are those based on the Z170 chipset. This is because you need to have support for the raid at the bios level and only the Z170 supports that at this time.
What I have done is an OS install on a Samsung M.2 SM951 PCIe NVMe Gen 3 X4 256GB single drive attached to the dedicated M.2 slot on a Z97 based board. In addition to that I installed 2 more of these same drives in M.2 PCIe adapter cards in a RAID 0 array. I have not had this setup for very long so I have had little time to test it out much at least in real world usage but I have done some prelimenary benchmarking of the drives and those numbers are very strong. I will attach a couple of benchmark screenshots here for you.
