CCF Archive Site

I use Macrium Reflect to clone the primary boot drive onto the secondary boot drive that's in standby mode all the time.

The primary is Samsung PM981 1TB and the secondary is the PM951, a little older and still a pretty fast SSD.  Basically I use 1TB but paid for 2TB. Data is expensive.

You can get either one for about $200 off your favorite online auction and Amazon also has fabulous deals on various SSDs like Samsung 860 2.5" SATA is only $127, shipped. They were $275 just a year ago so SSD prices are crashing through the floor.

I do run Win so I know it's worthless but have several more SSDs in the machine I plan to install CentOS on, making it triple boot I suppose. The 4th SSD is SATAIII and not bootable in my UEFI machine, unlike PCIe. If I figure out how to make it bootable, might throw something interesting on it or just clone the CentOS disk. Most likely use it as a data disk.

I clone using Macrium Reflect and then modify BIOS using bcdedit/bcdboot. There are various apps like EasyBCD but you can do everything on the command line.  Using a DOS prompt type app, I installed one that emulates Linux called CigWin64 terminal, really an old app that has been around for decades it seems. But you do have to run in admin mode.

My boot time is 27 seconds, I have no idea how some get it down to 10.

Just to make it perfectly clear, my machine is a desktop replacement type laptop, an MSI machine with a mechanical keyboard. I like it. It's several years old yet the hardware exceeds my requiements.

I have no experience with portable USB/Thunderbolt SSD . . . . if you get one, do let me know

My machine takes 4 SSDs, one is a 2.5" SATA III , it is older and a lot slower than PCIe/NVMe but in real life, you can never tell. SSDs in the 2.5" format seem to be a bit cheaper. Then I have 2 PCIe slots that are 2280 in size and another that's 2280 but not PCIe but regular SATA..  mSATA, it's slower but cheaper.

There is one floating around on Amazon, Samsung 860 1TB for $127, a fabulous deal IMO... I got an older 850 for almost $300 a year ago.

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-Internal-MZ-76E1T0B-AM/dp/B078DPCY3T/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1543731005&sr=8-2&keywords=samsung+evo+860+1tb