What I'm considering doing is using a generic two port M.2 drive (SATA and NVMe) as my root and swap device. Two of my systems on the network I'm constructing do not suport UEFI (HP Microserver G7 N54L). The M.2 SATA SSD is going to be connected to the internal systemboard SATA port.
I'm looking at generic dual M.2 cards with one being a M.2 NVMe and the other SATA M.2 with the root file systems in a software RAID1. Obviously you want to run root and swap on a fast device. NVMe makes sense to me as a primary root and swap device. I also want to be able to dual boot to FreeDOS (for diagnostic purposes) and FreeBSD on my servers.
I see this as the following;
I'm looking at generic dual M.2 cards with one being a M.2 NVMe and the other SATA M.2 with the root file systems in a software RAID1. Obviously you want to run root and swap on a fast device. NVMe makes sense to me as a primary root and swap device. I also want to be able to dual boot to FreeDOS (for diagnostic purposes) and FreeBSD on my servers.
I see this as the following;
- Loader is on a support legacy BIOS device; either SATA or USB drive.
- Loader defaults to booting the NVMe M.2 SSD.
- In the event of the NVMe M.2 device failure, it can be booted to the mirrored M.2 SATA device that's on the same PCIe card. This should make root fs disaster recovery simple as I just replace the M.2 NVMe SSD and dd it from the M.2 SATA SSD or let RAID1 take care of reconstructing the NVMe M.2 SSD.