Hello,
I have an Aspire 5 A515-57-51J2 that came with a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe Gen4. The SSD has Windows 11 preinstalled and is currently used as the boot drive.
According to my information, the laptop has two M.2 slots, one of which supports PCIe 4.0 and the other PCIe 3.0. The aforementioned 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe Gen4 is connected to the first slot obviously for maximum speed.
Now I want to install another 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD in the second slot. I bought one with PCIe 4.0, which I think is compatible with the PCIe 3.0 slot, so that shouldn't be a problem apart from a speed loss.
My question is: Can I install Windows 11 on the second hard drive, so that I can then dual boot and run two separate Windows 11 systems, each independent of each other? Or are there any technical or software reasons that prevent this? What confuses me a bit is I read that the first M.2 slot is for the "boot SSD" and the second for the "storage SSD". Is this mandatory for specific reasons? Are the speed losses with PCIe 3.0 vs. PCIe 4.0 so significant that the second slot should only be used for data storage?
I also heard that it's recommended to remove the first SSD when installing Windows 11 on the second SSD to avoid conflicts with the UEFI partitions.
The background to this is that I want two completely separate Windows 11 systems, one for work and one for personal use – each with 1 TB of storage and its own apps and files. I expect that each SSD will be able to see and access the other in Windows Explorer. As far as I know, this can be disabled in Windows Disk Management.
I appreciate any help, can you confirm my planned approach or are there any concerns against it?
