Cloning OS NVMe to new NVMe

strumpusplunket · 20 Jul 2022 at 10:56

My OS NVMe drive is only 120GB, and I am low on space and keep needing to use disk clean up to maintain a bit of headroom.

I have bought a new 500GB NVMe drive and I would much rather clone my existing OS drive to that rather than go through the faff of a complete reinstall.

I assume the quickest and easiest method would be to add the new drive to my second m2 slot (Asus Strix X470-F board), clone the drive using Macrium, check it boots and then swap the new drive to the first slot.

However, my understanding is that my second m2 slot will only work in SATA mode and not NVMe when I have drives in both (I could have this wrong, of course). Will this have any impact on the drive setup and performance when I switch it back to the first slot? (Or is there a better way of doing this overall?)

Mercenary Keyboard Warrior · 20 Jul 2022 at 11:10

If you think its handy you can buy NVME caddies for not that much now so you can get a pretty high performing backup device that way for the cost of the caddy

Install new into caddy, clone existing to that. Switch off and move new NVME to PC, power up and test and if all is dandy install old nvme into caddy and format would be my approach.

I bought a cheapo caddy and it will sustain 1gbs read write to an NVME put in it.

strumpusplunket · 20 Jul 2022 at 12:53

Mercenary Keyboard Warrior said:
If you think its handy you can buy NVME caddies for not that much now so you can get a pretty high performing backup device that way for the cost of the caddy

Install new into caddy, clone existing to that. Switch off and move new NVME to PC, power up and test and if all is dandy install old nvme into caddy and format would be my approach.

I bought a cheapo caddy and it will sustain 1gbs read write to an NVME put in it.

That's a neat idea. Cheers. I never knew such things existed!

Presumably, I could boot from the caddy too to test that before swapping the drives over incase something goes wrong?

Mercenary Keyboard Warrior · 20 Jul 2022 at 13:50

strumpusplunket said:
That's a neat idea. Cheers. I never knew such things existed!

Presumably, I could boot from the caddy too to test that before swapping the drives over incase something goes wrong?

A modern mobo will see it I think, there are still some minor issues with full NVME support but its certainly a possibility

strumpusplunket · 20 Jul 2022 at 15:04

Mercenary Keyboard Warrior said:
A modern mobo will see it I think, there are still some minor issues with full NVME support but its certainly a possibility

Ah, the thing is, though, I would really like to be able to make sure I can actually boot from the cloned drive before swapping out the primary m2 drive.

As I'd have to remove the gfx card each time as well as screw in the drive and assemble the mobo heatsink bits on top of it, I would really rather not have to do this more than once. That's why I was thinking of trying to clone in the second slot (which is more accessbile and doesn't need anything else removing or unscrewing).

I do like the idea of the caddy as an alternative, but not really if it won't definitely let me check if the new drive is bootable. I had the issue in the past of some cloning programmes seeming to clone my OS drive, but the PC not wanting to boot from it. That was still a pain, but less so given I just had to switch around a SATA cable that time.

mrk · 21 Jul 2022 at 10:55

You can just select the new cloned drive in your UEFI/BIOS once the cloning is completed. You will need to select the caddy shown as Windows Boot Manager as that's what the UEFI will see it as.

Note that once booted, Windows will complain of a drive letter conflict since your old drive will still be installed unless you disable it in the BIOS before booting up properly with the caddy. Might be the better option. then once all good, just swap over and re-enable the internal slot.

strumpusplunket · 21 Jul 2022 at 12:11

mrk said:
You can just select the new cloned drive in your UEFI/BIOS once the cloning is completed. You will need to select the caddy shown as Windows Boot Manager as that's what the UEFI will see it as.

Note that once booted, Windows will complain of a drive letter conflict since your old drive will still be installed unless you disable it in the BIOS before booting up properly with the caddy. Might be the better option. then once all good, just swap over and re-enable the internal slot.

Cool. Cheers!

Though, I notice a decent caddy is about £20-25. Which is not exactly a fortune, but a bit more than I was hoping.

If I did go for the option of just putting it in the second slot, would that fact that it might only function as a SATA drive rather than NVMe make any difference to its bootability once I swap it to the top slot?

mrk · 21 Jul 2022 at 12:18

Would make no difference to booting, Winodws Boot Manager would still be the detected boot method on both drives assuming the cloning goes properly. The only difference would be the overall cloning speed as you'd be limited to some 550MB/s if both drives run at SATA 6 speeds because both slots are in use. Still, 550MB/s is not exactly slow.

strumpusplunket · 21 Jul 2022 at 12:23

mrk said:
Would make no difference to booting, Winodws Boot Manager would still be the detected boot method on both drives assuming the cloning goes properly. The only difference would be the overall cloning speed as you'd be limited to some 550MB/s if both drives run at SATA 6 speeds because both slots are in use. Still, 550MB/s is not exactly slow.

Brilliant. Thanks, that's just the information I needed!