M.2 and Bios boot settings

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tharbin78

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Hello friends, I purchased a ASUS RogGL752VW with Windows 10 installed. I immediately changed my hard drive from 1tb HDD to a 1tb Samsung SSD and cloned the original hard drive on to the new SSD. Great!
I just purchased and installed a Samsung 850 EVO - 500GB - M.2 SATA III SSD. Computer recognized it as Microsoft Windows, whereas my original was listed as Windows 10. I used "EasyBCD 2.3" to set it to boot the new M.2 "Microsoft Windows" and it works great.
My question is, because I want my machine to work at its best, what do I do to get to that potential. What do I do with the original SSD harddrive which is still in my computer. How can I use both together to create a "Rocket ship"! LOL
Please help because I am limited in knowledge when it comes to this stuff.
Just a note...Just to see what would happen, I removed the SSD harddrive and re booted. It booted into Bios and that's as far as it would go. Hmmmm
 
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BadAsAl

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If I understand correctly:
You have a 1 TB SATA SSD 2.5" form factor
You also have a 500 GB m.2 SSD that uses the SATA III interface.
So you are able to have the SSD installed in the hard drive bay, and the m.2 installed in the m.2 slot?
The problem comes when you remove the SSD from the hard drive bay and try to use only the m.2 SSD?
 
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tharbin78

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You were close. 1tb sad hard drive and 500gb m.2. My real questions are;1) can I now empty the original harddrive to recover the space since I cloned the info to the m.2? 2) what do I do to use the two ssd's together to increase its speed and power?
 
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BadAsAl

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Both of your drives are SATA SSD's, just to make that clear.
The 1TB SSD uses the SATA connection to your motherboard.
The 500GB SSD uses the m.2 connection.
But the interfaces are both SATA and you will not see a significant difference in speeds between the drives.

If you can remove the 1TB drive and still boot successfully with only the 500GB drive m.2 installed then you can safely turn the 1TB drive into storage by deleting the partitions and formatting it. I would not worry about increasing speed, you might be able to use some form of RAID (not an expert) but even if you double the read speed you aren't going to notice a significant difference. Your read speeds should be around 500MB/s but even if you get to 1000MB/s it won't be noticeable. I have an nvme SSD that I clocked at 2800 MB/s and it isn't much faster than my Samsung SATA SSD.

Bottomline: make sure you can boot with only m.2 in there.
Reinstall the 1TB and wipe it (I like using DISKPART from a command prompt).
Make sure you are set to boot from the m.2 in BIOS
 
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tharbin78

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Thank you. Using Samsung magic, On rapid mode my numbers are: Sequintial:read. 5,488, write. 3,159 and Random: read. 151,027 and write. 67,434. I don't know much about these numbers. Can you tell me what they mean?
 
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tharbin78

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One last question regarding booting with m.2; if the m.2 is ok (which it seems to be) if I slide the hard drive out, should it still boot up, or does the hard drive need to be in the to make a connection. I'm just wondering if a laptop cannot boot without something there in place. In my bios it shows the m.2 as the boot device. When I cloned, I only cloned the primary "C:" drive and not the recovery partition, etc. according to Macrium Reflect, the primary was all I needed. I'm most worried about erasing the hard drive and losing something. Sorry but I do have another question because it's hard to find someone as smart as you to talk to. Would it help if I could somehow (after cleaning 1tb hard drive) move all my programs and games, Word, things like that, to the hard drive and off if the m.2? Would things work better to have just the boot files on the m.2 instead of the full clone that I did? I know it's a lot of questions but I appreciate it! Tim
 
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tharbin78

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BadAsAl

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The laptop will boot but will likely say it cannot find a bootable device so Windows will not start. You would at that point just be able to boot the laptop to the BIOS screen.

Typically with a system you buy form Dell or HP or Lenovo, etc. they provide a recovery partition that stores the files necessary to restore the computer to factory settings, meaning when you run their recovery tool, it erases everything and re-installs Windows and all the programs that came with it when it was purchased. This partition is safe to delete provided you never intend to restore the computer to the factory settings. It should be a largish partition, greater than 5GB and can be as much as 20GB or more. It sounds to me like you didn't clone this one which is fine.

The proof that you did the clone correctly is being able to boot with only the m.2 drive in there. If you get into Windows and everything works then you can be sure you indeed did the clone correctly and can install the original hard drive again and do whatever you want with it.

But, you should have all important data backed up somewhere else anyway, because if something goes wrong, you could lose it all. So any files, pictures, documents, anything you created using your programs, etc. should be backed up. right now, I think you have this since you cloned the drive, the SSD is the back up for the m.2, but that goes away if you erase it.
 
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tharbin78

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Sequintial: read- 523, write- 481
Random: read- 87,264 , write- 75,568.
Sure seems like things are running slow for a computer with 32gb ram, 1tb Ssd hard drive and 500gb m.2 ssd., 960m nvidia gforce Gtx, etc. what am I doing wrong?
 
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tharbin78

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Dec 31, 2016
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tharbin78

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Yes, before I did anything, I backed up my computer with an image also to my external passport hard drive. It is on there. Then I just cloned directly from my hard drive to my m.2, but I did not include the recovery part of the partition. I'm wondering now if I should re-clone the M.2 adding that to it. I am going to try taking the back off and pulling the hard drive out again to see if it will boot up to windows with just the m.2. The last time I tried it would not boot past the bios page. I'm not sure what that means or what I have to do to get it so that I can erase all the information on my hard drive so that I can use it for storage but I'm going to keep on until I figure it out. I hope I can bring a few more questions your way. Thank you.
 
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tharbin78

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Dec 31, 2016
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Ok, I just removed the hard drive and booted. Bios page comes up. My menu is such: main, advanced, boot, security, save & exit. I opened boot. It shows no boot device, only this....:
Fast boot (enabled),
Add new boot option,
Delete boot option.

That's it. Where do I go from here? Obviously the m.2 is not being recognized as a boot device.
In my disk management and my macrium Reflect, it shows the m.2 as "c:" drive, and the original hard drive shows to be "E:" drive. I sure wish I knew what all of this meant! Please help
 
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tharbin78

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Dec 31, 2016
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Update, I re-cloned the m.2 and put all the partitions on it instead of just the primary "c:" on it. I have taken the hard drive out and it will now boot up...., but,
I have to do it through bios.
It lists my m.2, my CD-ROM, and my boot mgr Samsung 500gb m.2.
Those three options, but I cannot get them to move so that I can list the m.2 as first boot. So when i start it, it gives me he message to use a available boot drive. What can I do to move it to #1?
 
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