Dual booting on two separate m.2 drives

[lentife]

Hi folks, I plan on building my second Mac/Win10 dual boot Hackintosh from scratch and am looking for advice.

My intention is to use two separate Samsung 970 evo 500GB m.2 drives, one for the Mac and one for the Windows partition.

As for the motherboard, I am looking at the Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming, which has 2x m.2 slots and a 1151-v2 socket for 8th gen intel processors.

Do you have any advice regarding compatibility and performance of two m.2 drives in a dual boot setup? Is this a good idea or do you recommend another setup (one single m.2 drive with larger capacity w/ two partitions)?

Looking forward to your opinions. Thanks a lot!

 

[Going Bald]

There is no technical reason why you cannot dual boot on 2 separate m.2 drives so far as I am aware. Since I do not have the hardware to do it I cannot definitively state as a fact that it works or not. Try it and find out, then let the forum know.

 

[Budge72]

This is exactly what I'm planning as well. Have you got it working yet?

 

[jaymonkey]

@lentife,

I have two Nvme drives on my main video edit (White Knight) Build ... 2 x Samsung Evo 960 NVMe SSD's High Sierra on one, Windows 10 on the other .... rather than use a EFI partition on one of the NVMe drives for Clover i bought a 8GB SATA SSD for just a few pounds ... similar to this one:-

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SANDISK-...654959?hash=item2aa722146f:g:Iy0AAOSwNkxa3aCr

Its 8GB but 4GB or even 2GB will do just fine. I formatted it as GTP and installed Clover on to the EFI partition on that and configured the BIOS to boot form it.

The advantage is that if anything ever happens to your OSX or Clover configuration its easy to remove and and play with on anther machine ... in my case i usually connect it to my laptop using a USB to SATA adapter Y cable ....

You can use the rest of the 8GB drive as an installer and recovery drive or just a small data drive ...

This method has saved me several times in the past ... these days now that HS supports 3rd party NVMe drives its not so important but if you have spare/unused SATA controller i think booting the system from a small capacity dedicated boot SDD makes good sense.

Just thought i'd share my method
Cheers
Jay

 

[Budge72]

Thanks Jay. That sounds perfect. I'm going to give that a try.

Maybe you can answer my other question about this setup. https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/pre-build-question-dual-boot-with-windows-10-speed-issues.256993/

 

[lentife]

Thank you very much for your help! Will try this soon and report back. Waiting for the release of the new chips hoping the 8thgen CPUs are going to be cheaper.

 

[lentife]

@lentife,

I formatted it as GTP and installed Clover on to the EFI partition on that and configured the BIOS to boot form it.

The advantage is that if anything ever happens to your OSX or Clover configuration its easy to remove and and play with on anther machine ... in my case i usually connect it to my laptop using a USB to SATA adapter Y cable ....

You can use the rest of the 8GB drive as an installer and recovery drive or just a small data drive ...

This is really interesting and totally makes sense. Do you have a more detailed explanation on how to do it step by step? Thanks a lot!!

 

[jaymonkey]

This is really interesting and totally makes sense. Do you have a more detailed explanation on how to do it step by step? Thanks a lot!!

You don't really need to do anything special other than format the low capacity SSD as GPT ... if you use a SATA to USB Y Cable then you can treat like a USB stick to Format it and install Clover on to it on a another machine ... you can use the main partition as a UniBeast Installer if you get one thats 8GB+ .. then unplug and connect to spare Motherboard SATA port on target machine ... set it as the boot drive in the BIOS ... job done ... very handy having a dedicated and easy to remove Boot & Clover SSD on a system that uses multiple NVMe SSD's ... especially if things go wrong.

Cheers
Jay

 

[cheekymoonkey]

I have two m.2 NVMe drives (Samsung 960 & 970) running windows 10 and High Sierra on an Asrock Z370 Killer SLI/ac for months without issues. Having some problems with my clover update today, but I'm 99.9% confident it has more to do with my lack of understanding rather than any compatibility issues.

 

[Budge72]

You don't really need to do anything special other than format the low capacity SSD as GPT ... if you use a SATA to USB Y Cable then you can treat like a USB stick to Format it and install Clover on to it on a another machine ... you can use the main partition as a UniBeast Installer if you get one thats 8GB+ .. then unplug and connect to spare Motherboard SATA port on target machine ... set it as the boot drive in the BIOS ... job done ... very handy having a dedicated and easy to remove Boot & Clover SSD on a system that uses multiple NVMe SSD's ... especially if things go wrong.

Cheers
Jay

Do you still need to install W10 on a GPT formatted NVMe drive? Also, what is the advantage of Clover vs the motherboard boot menu?