Hard drive questions

[Voeille]

When I firstly placed my order, I was asked after clicking proceed to choose the drive on which the OS will be installed, and I chose the M.2 drive. My order went through quite a few amendments since September, including the drives, and after adding a scratch drive it showed me a warning message that the OS will be installed on the 1st drive selected, which happens to be the hard drive (as the small SSD is secondary). I ignored it as I thought it would remember my choice, but now I'm wondering and wanted to ask — if I have the following drives in my order, and I chose the M.2 drive for the OS initially, will it be installed on the 200GB partition of the Samsung drive?

1st Storage Drive	8TB SEAGATE IRONWOLF PRO 3.5", 7200 RPM 256MB CACHE Change to: 4TB SEAGATE IRONWOLF PRO 3.5", 7200 RPM 128MB CACHE Partitions: 2000GB, 2000GB
2nd Storage Drive	NOT REQUIRED Change to: 256GB PCS 2.5" SSD, SATA 6 Gb (500MB/R, 400MB/W) Partitions: 256GB
1st M.2 SSD Drive	1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3300MB/W) Change to: 1TB SAMSUNG 980 PRO M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 7000MB/R, 5000MB/W) Partitions: 200GB, 800GB

 

[AgentCooper]

I’m not 100% sure, but if you use the live chat service and speak to an operator there you can specify exactly what drive and partition you want it to go on. They’ll log the request for the build team 👍

 

[Martinr36]

I would have thought so, might be worth just asking the question on chat with them, that's what i did when I addedM.2 drive to my laptop as an amendment

 

[Martinr36]

@AgentCooper beat me to it

 

[AgentCooper]

@AgentCooper beat me to it

I was due a win at some point, I’m always a split second behind most replies 😜

 

[Voeille]

Thanks, I will ask them on the chat then.

While we're talking about drives, I have another question — how likely are the M.2 drives to fail, and is it possible to recover data is they do? I plan to install games on the second M.2 partition, and I usually mod games if it's possible, so it'd be a shame to lose my work if the drive fails. Are frequent backups to the 4TB hard drive (or the external one I currently have) worth the time?

 

[Martinr36]

I've got Acronis set to backup once a week, don't even know it is happening

 

[BlessedSquirrel]

I've got Acronis set to backup once a week, don't even know it is happening

I'll add a plus one for Acronis, out of all the partition / backup solutions I've used, it's by far the most competent. Don't think I've ever had a failure with it.

 

[Voeille]

And here I was thinking about manually copying... But if there's a reliable software that can just do it in the background for me, then I'll just set it up and not worry any more.

 

[Martinr36]

As well as acronis I've got one drive & dropbox for photos & documents etc