Cloning NVME

freakynorm · February 25, 2019

I just built a new gaming rig and have a Gigabyte Aorus Pro Wifi mobo with 2 NVME slots. I am using a 1TB Samsung 970 NVME drive on the bottom slot. It works great and boots so fast, it takes me longer to type in my password than the actual boot up process. I like to have a backup drive for my main drive and was wondering if I can use the 2nd NVME slot for a backup drive and clone the existing to it. I have read some stuff about issues coming up when cloning to/from NVME drives. I was going to just us a 1TB 2.5" SSD to be the backup but figured since the price difference was negligible, I could just pick up another NVME drive to use.

Any comments or suggestions to not go with the 2 NVME drive route? Thanks!

AbydosOne · February 25, 2019

3 hours ago, freakynorm said:

I just built a new gaming rig and have a Gigabyte Aorus Pro Wifi mobo with 2 NVME slots. I am using a 1TB Samsung 970 NVME drive on the bottom slot. It works great and boots so fast, it takes me longer to type in my password than the actual boot up process. I like to have a backup drive for my main drive and was wondering if I can use the 2nd NVME slot for a backup drive and clone the existing to it. I have read some stuff about issues coming up when cloning to/from NVME drives. I was going to just us a 1TB 2.5" SSD to be the backup but figured since the price difference was negligible, I could just pick up another NVME drive to use.

Any comments or suggestions to not go with the 2 NVME drive route? Thanks!

If you aren't going to use the backup on a constant basis (which you aren't), just buy a hard drive and do incremental backups to that. Really not worth wasting the money to keep such high-speed backups, IMHO. You can buy a much larger HDD (4~6TB, good quality) for the same price as another 1TB SSD, and you could store all sorts of other things on it, too. If you're worried about noise, keep in in a dock and eject it/power it off when not in use.

matt-fr · February 26, 2019

I have nothing against doing backup on a second NVMe drive or a 2.5" drive.

But two suggestions :

1. I've already seen people doing backups, with full clones on drives that are directly on the computer.

This is a bad idea, has some of these people didn't even notice that the primary drive died and that they were working on the second drive. Or for some reason the BIOS options changed the boot drive.

Don't do full backups, create clone images. It will create a file.

2. Keep in mind that if you have an electrical problem in the computer, it could fry your drives. And in this case the backups are useless.

freakynorm · February 27, 2019

11 hours ago, matt-fr said:

I have nothing against doing backup on a second NVMe drive or a 2.5" drive.

But two suggestions :

1. I've already seen people doing backups, with full clones on drives that are directly on the computer.

This is a bad idea, has some of these people didn't even notice that the primary drive died and that they were working on the second drive. Or for some reason the BIOS options changed the boot drive.

Don't do full backups, create clone images. It will create a file.

2. Keep in mind that if you have an electrical problem in the computer, it could fry your drives. And in this case the backups are useless.

Yeah, I have always done a clone of the original drive and kept it outside the computer for safe keeping. I have a USB hard drive docking station. Thanks!