Has anyone ever used a hardware switch to choose their boot drive as an alternative to Clover??

My PC case has a hardware switch to select fan speed, or at least it’s supposed to... it has three positions: “HIGH - OFF - LOW”, but for some reason that I haven’t yet had time to look into, it only powers the fans in the ‘HIGH’ position, which is fine by me because they aren’t that loud and may as well be working at the fullest of their ability if they are going to be in the case…

Anyway, when I was doing a little dusting in my computer, I realised that I could probably repurposed this switch to allow me to select which of two hard drives is connected to the motherboard, the one with my Windows OS or the one with my macOS…

Now straight away, I realise that there is a drawback here, in that it will only allow me to have one of the two drives connected to my computer at once, meaning transferring files between the two would be impossible, but I also have a third hard drive in my computer that contains all of my media, which I could leave permanently connected as sort of a “go-between“…

The main reason I’d like to use a hardware switch instead of selecting the boot drive via Clover is that for the most part I use my MacOS Installation, but sometimes, for example when I’m playing games on my Windows OS, I want to reboot quickly and it can be a pain trying to Time the button press correctly/having to wait around for the Clover boot disk selection screen to pop up, so it would be really helpful to leave the switch in either “windows“ or “Mac“ position and just hit restart and know that I could go use the restroom or grab a drink from the fridge and have it waiting at the correct OS when I got back.

Has anyone else ever tried this and did you have any success? It sounds like it should be pretty straightforward, I’m just not sure about how to make sure the switching from one drive to the next happens safely… I know modern SATA SSDs are supposed to be pretty hot-swappable but I’m sure I would always have to fully shut the machine down before switching from one to the other… Also I don’t know which line(s) to run via the switch, but I’m guessing it would be easier to switch on/off the power to each drive, rather than trying to switch the actual data connection… But maybe I would just need to switch one of the power rails and that would be enough to have the “off“ drive stay powered down?

Let me know if you guys have any suggestions!!

submitted by /u/peanutismint
[link] [comments]