Boot partition on secondary partition?

I will be swapping my optical drive for a SSD today and will be converting the original system drive into a dedicated data drive. It occured to me that I'll more space than I actually needed, and that having a clone of the SSD on the HDD might be useful. I can see two fairly straightforward options:
1. Partition HDD into "SSD Clone" (primary) and "Data" (secondary)
2. Partition HDD into "Data" (primary) and "SSD Clone" (secondary)
My assumption is that from the standpoint of keeping things "fully compatible," #1 is really the best option. That said, I want the option in the future to format the clone partition and expand the Data partition to the full size of the HDD. As such, I figure #2 will give me that option (without having to clone, format, reclone the data drive). My only concern would be if having the clone partition as a secondary partition (i.e. the system partition in the event the SSD fails and I have to run off the HDD) could cause some issues. (Don't ask me why I think this. Just a hunch.) So, "tl;dr"...
If I parition the physical HDD such that a data partition is primary and the system partition is secondary, will I run into problems trying to operate in that configuration.
PS In the event that I ever wne tback to HDD+optical, I would reclone the HDD so that system was first and data was second. Option 2 above would just be for troubleshooting purposes/waiting on a replacement SSD.

Not really. In Windows you can create Primary and Logical partition on the same drive or just logical in an extended partition covering the whole drive. But you can only have 4 Primary partition on any one drive
On Mac OS X there really isn't anything like Locigal or Primary partitions. That is a restriction in DOS/Windows File Format scheme, even with NTFS. Don't get me started on that. I could go on and on.
With OS X you can have any # of partition on one drive.
So when you create partitions on a Mac they are completely different then on a Windows PC
I recently had installed on one drive Mt Lion and its Recovery HD partition, Lion and its Recovery partition and Snow Leopard. Along with the Mac EFI 200MB partition for a total of 6 different partitions. Mac/OS X didn't care. Completely different file system.
Xian Rinpoche wrote:
Sounds good. Thanks!
(And your experience with resizing partitions fits mine. If I remember my PC days correctly, it's because the secondary partition is actually a "logical" partition contiained with the primary partition, which is "physical." This may be different for Macs, though.)

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