I was forced to bring it back from the dead, but now I recognize its usefulness

XDA Developers

A personal account of repurposing an old 250GB Samsung 860 EVO SATA SSD that had been unused since upgrading to NVMe storage. The drive found new life as a dedicated Windows 11 installation to avoid dual-boot complications on the primary NVMe drive. Future plans include converting it to external storage using a cheap SATA-to-USB enclosure for portable media use.

I stopped treating my old 250GB SATA SSD as e-waste, and now I can't live without it

My SATA SSD had been gathering dust for years

Everything changed when I needed a Windows 11 installation

I could turn the old SSD into external storage or a recovery drive

If you have Linux on one drive and Windows on another, you can still have dual boot issues. For example, if Linux breaks the UEFI partitions, Windows may get confused and boot based on the one from the other disk and that screws up stuff like ReFS formatted hard disks.
I’m speaking out of experience. This was one of my biggest data loss moments in my entire life.

I don’t get the excitement in this article. The key parts is that this is throwaway (the sata ssd will be noticably slower), but to keep isolation of concerns isn’t true as one of the commenters noted at the boot level.