LurchFrinky
Senior member
This is purely hypothetical as I have none of these components...
So the Samsung XP941 can be mounted on an adapter card and pretty much used as storage if installed in a pcie slot in any computer.
The problem comes from people wanting to boot from it. Currently this is limited to specific enthusiast boards with UEFI and an up-to-date BIOS.
Linux uses a multi-step boot process including MBR loading and GRUB (as examples). I know you can put the MBR on a separate disk, but is it possible to put some or all of the other boot phases on a separate disk?
My reasoning is that the XP941 is not viewable by the BIOS (in most computers), but it is viewable to the OS. At some point in the boot process, the XP941 becomes viewable to the OS. As long as this does not happen in the last phase, you could offload some of these boot processes to an initial, and bootable, device like a usb stick, but still have the XP941 as your "boot" drive.
I realize that, while I have mentioned a specific drive in my example, this could be used on any drive, but the XP941 is fairly unique in both performance and compatibility. And I know we could just boot from a usb stick and have a secondary drive, but that sounds slow. The point would be to gain the benefits of the faster drive without having to buy from a limited selection of motherboards.
Since I don't know a lot about all of the boot phases, I don't know if what I am suggesting is even possible. I will freely admit that, outside of this one case, the notion of splitting these phases would be pointless.
Am I crazy for thinking of this?
So the Samsung XP941 can be mounted on an adapter card and pretty much used as storage if installed in a pcie slot in any computer.
The problem comes from people wanting to boot from it. Currently this is limited to specific enthusiast boards with UEFI and an up-to-date BIOS.
Linux uses a multi-step boot process including MBR loading and GRUB (as examples). I know you can put the MBR on a separate disk, but is it possible to put some or all of the other boot phases on a separate disk?
My reasoning is that the XP941 is not viewable by the BIOS (in most computers), but it is viewable to the OS. At some point in the boot process, the XP941 becomes viewable to the OS. As long as this does not happen in the last phase, you could offload some of these boot processes to an initial, and bootable, device like a usb stick, but still have the XP941 as your "boot" drive.
I realize that, while I have mentioned a specific drive in my example, this could be used on any drive, but the XP941 is fairly unique in both performance and compatibility. And I know we could just boot from a usb stick and have a secondary drive, but that sounds slow. The point would be to gain the benefits of the faster drive without having to buy from a limited selection of motherboards.
Since I don't know a lot about all of the boot phases, I don't know if what I am suggesting is even possible. I will freely admit that, outside of this one case, the notion of splitting these phases would be pointless.
Am I crazy for thinking of this?
