2 SSD & be able to backup to HDD and restore easily

The thread title says a lot, so worth repeating and then breaking that down and discussing it.

"2 SSD & be able to backup to HDD and restore easily"

Laptop is latest Lenovo T530 with most recent ver. 2.07 BIOS dated Nov. 14, 2012. (date of the files is something like Dec. 14, 2012, but given difference what else is new?)

2 SSD:
Means a 2.5" boot SSD 512GB Crucial M4 SSD (SATA 3)
And a mSATA 256GB Crucial M4 SSD (also SATA 3, but suspect T530 only has SATA 2 for that mSATA connection)

I gather that the key for SSD use is to have the BIOS set to AHCI.

The whole thing about MBR (old stuff) and newer UEFI and GPT is that the old stuff still seems to prevail!!!

Image my surprise when I booted my new Lenovo T530 from a USB boot flash stick of Gparted (partition program), only to learn that the 500GB HDD that Lenovo sent the machine with has the old MBR scheme with 3 primary partitions on it!

So much for moving to UEFI and GPT and the new world!!

I also searched the SSD subforum and Linux forum and Lenovo forum for GPT but without any real success.

But at least the AHCI choice is already set with the main drive which is a HDD and the T530 works with that.

BTW if you make the mistake of setting up with GPT on your drives (in this case my 2 SSD drives) that it is likely that it won't be long before one or more programs has a serious problem with it.

So be it! I'll set up the 2 SSD using the old MBR scheme! And of course AHCI.

Then I'll pull out the DVD drive and plug in a temp HDD, and then boot USB stick with latest Clonezilla and try to clone the boot drive (the 512MB SSD).

If that seems to work, I'll take that HDD and plug it into the main drive bay and see if the T530 will boot with that.

If it does,
If it does,
If it does,
If it does, then I've got what I want: a solid backup and recovery system.

Once I've got certainty of that, then I can worry about if/how I might be able to make it easier to do.

 

So your intention is to clone your SSD boot drive to an external HDD as a backup system, so you can clone the HDD backup back to the SSD if you need to restore. Is that correct?

I don't know much about system backups - how is this functionally different from the built-in backup systems of the various OS's?

 

Close but not 100%

1st step: do a clone backup, from the boot 2.5" 512GB SSD to the 500GB HDD that is temporarily plugged into the 2nd bay.

2nd step: remove both drives from laptop. (Note that *both* drives are still working.)

3rd step: plug only the HDD into the main bay.

4th step: find out if laptop boots and works properly with only the HDD.
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If it works, then I've got a failsafe method that is cheap, for when on an extended trip.

Note that if/when I actually need the backup HDD, in that case there will be either a) a failure of the SSD, or b) some odd problem with the SSD.

 

I can't follow what you are saying.


You are talking like the riddler.

 

No, what he said in the second post makes sense. Basically he wants his system drive backed up on a separate HDD that can be switched into the system in case of a failure of the SSD.

@OtherSongs - It's 99% likely the SSD will never fail on you, but the solution you're suggesting seems like it would be a functional way of having an easy plug-and-play backup drive in case it did. Is there a question here, or are you simply telling us your plans?

 

Correct.

I'm also the 1st one to admit that it's a more expensive way to do backup; namely I'd be carrying one (or even two) separate extra 2.5" HDD in a caddy at cost ~$65+$15= $80 total for each HDD/caddy combo. When I say separate, I mean I'd have nothing in the DVD drive, which makes the laptop 5.6 oz lighter. I'd plug in the backup HDD briefly in order to do an occasional clone backup.

FWIW I used Clonezilla this afternoon to clone the factory Toshiba 2.5" 500GB HDD to a WD Scorpio Black 2.5" 750GB, both drives 7200 rpm. Then removed the Toshiba drive and put in the WD drive. The laptop (a new Lenovo T530) booted fine with the cloned disk, so no surprises so far. And it went acceptably fast.

I'm new to laptops.

My one question is whether this approach, that I'm taking, will work?

e.g. I had expected to see UEFI and GPT being used, but discovered that the older MBR still rules for laptop HDD.

I did some extensive searching on 4 or 5 NBR forums, and discovered that the older MBR also rules for laptop SSD.

The only thing new (from my desktop PC's which are all 18+ months old), is to use AHCI, for the SATA setting in the BIOS.

And since I started the title of this thread with "2 SSD..." in fact that is the more complete picture, namely that I'll have both a 512GB M4 SSD in the main bay, and a 256GB M4 mSATA SSD in the slot for that type of device. I don't see the presence of the mSATA SSD being a show stopper, but odd things sometimes happen when you get down to actually trying to do something, especially if it is not a typical thing that at least a few people do.

Anyway I'll leave the DVD bay empty (to save weight), most of the time.

The mSATA unit should show up early next week, which is when I'll put the 2 SSD units into the laptop and get started with a fresh install of Win7_64 Pro (which I paid Lenovo money to set the laptop up with). I've already created bootable USB sticks with Win7_64 Pro/SP1, and latest Clonezilla and Gparted. I see no reason to preserve Lenovo's HDD MBR partition scheme of 3 primary partitions (all NTFS) and plan to go with MBR with a single primary NTFS partition on the 2.5" 512GB M4 SSD with only ~410GB allocated (leaving roughly 102GB unallocated so that the SSD will function at high performance).

I'll also get around to trying a clone backup to an external HDD via USB 3 connector, but expect it to be unacceptably slow.

Plugging in an internal 2.5" 7200 HDD into the open DVD slot goes at the faster SATA II speed, and this afternoon experience was acceptable in terms of time needed to do a successful full clone backup.

And with regard to your above "It's 99% likely the SSD will never fail on you" I suspect your 99% value is too high. Maybe way too high.

 

Adding the mSATA SSD shouldn't change anything in terms of the functionality of your backup solution. If you're trying to backup the mSATA SSD at the same time as the main drive, you might have issues fitting everything on your backup drives, but if it's backed up on a separate drive, or not backed up at all, then there should be no issue.

As long as your SSD's don't have manufacturing flaws, you're not going to wear them out with overuse. If there's a manufacturing flaw, I would assume it would manifest in relatively short order (but maybe not). Otherwise, SSD's are extremely reliable. As long as the SSD's have no manufacturing flaws and they don't get overfilled, I would bet on them surviving 10 years of daily use without a hiccup. Accounting for manufacturing flaws, 99% is a high estimate, but 95% (with 4% manufacturing flaws and 1% burnout or breakdown) is probably close to reasonable.

Backup is backup - most people never need it, but you're always best off having it available. If it's worth the time and money to you, then your solution sounds solid. On the GPT/MBR/UEFI stuff, I've got nothing.

 

Thanks very much for your responses.

With regard to GPT/MBR/UEFI it seems clear that everyday laptop users w/Windows aren't using it. Odds are someone is using it, but who? Maybe the IT business world where they have super sized servers with industrial strength I/O needs?

 

A few other thoughts... > pun intended <

What exactly is the difference between "sleep" and "hibernate" on a laptop that is running Windows 7???

e.g. on my desktop PC's, running both Win XP and Win 7 (running strictly with HDD devices), there's a "standby" option (in the BIOS it's called S3 (FWIW I've never tried S5)), that is somewhat robust (but not 100% robust) and rather useful at avoiding slow shutdown and painfully long boot times.

I mean given that I'm running a SSD as my large boot drive (~410GB allocated as 1 NTFS boot partition via Gparted, 102GB not allocated for better long term performance), does Windows 7 write my 16GB of RAM to the boot drive for one or both of "sleep" and "hibernate"?

Because that might make a change on how I allocate partitions on my 2 SSD devices.

For the 2nd SSD device (256GB mSATA SSD), I'm likely going to try setting up the laptop with a dual boot of Win7 and some flavor of Linux. Partitioning for the smaller mSATA SSD might be something like this:
1 primary FAT32 partition ~50GB
1 primary EXT3 partition ~140GB
1 Linux swap partition ~17GB (intended for "sleep" since I've got 16GB of memory on the machine)
unallocated space ~49GB

The clone backup program of choice is the free Clonezilla program which will handle the partition scheme of the mSATA drive, whereas Acronis backup doesn't.

Any comments and/or ideas?

 

A quick Google search could confirm, but I think the Sleep/Hibernate options work essentially the same on Windows 7/8 as they did before: sleep provides power to the RAM so the session is saved until you wake up the machine, but it takes power from the battery to do so, while Hibernate writes the RAM to the drive so your session can be recalled when you power back on, but you're not burning any battery power in between.

 

Reading the writeup on UEFI (for the 3rd time) finally starts to make some sense; see: Unified Extensible Firmware Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Confusing subject, but not a bad writeup.

The "Criticism" section may provide some insight into why it's been a slow go.

 

I may try google but your above answer looks good to me. Meaning for me to proceed with partitioning as I originally planned.

Thanks very much for your willingness to venture forth in this thread.

For that matter, so far you're the only one.

Worth 2 likes in my book.

(And by that I don't mean smilies!)