Is it possible to BOOT from pcie SSD ?

[gjarold]

Hello,

I am interested in a new SSD for my 2009 octo ... right now I have one of the original Intel x25-e devices.

But this is constrained by SATA, and I'd like to get one of those blazing fast pcie cards that have the SSD onboard.

Question: can you boot from these ? That is, can I remove all other disks/storage from the system and ONLY use the pcie device ?

If so, what models are available that can be booted and used exclusively ?

Thanks.

 

[philipma1957]

I don't know of any but owc will have a pcie card soon maybe that one will.


I am waiting for intels new one. a 250gb ssd model 510 for about 580 usd

I may run a pair in raid0 as a boot drive . Along with 2 internal 3tb hdds.

 

[nanofrog]

Such a product would need to have EFI (or EBC) firmware in order to boot OS X.

Unfortunately, no PCIe Flash drive exists that does AFAIK (OWC's isn't out yet, and last I checked, Fusion IO's products haven't yet added that feature, though it was promised some time ago).

 

[Bithero]

It seems OCZ gave up on Macs

I am trying to find such a product myself since a long time. OCZ was announcing a Mac OSX version of their Z-Drive R2 since middle of last year. But so far it was just vaporware. They removed the "OSX coming soon" from all of their Z-Drive product specs. So maybe they gave up on OSX or they prepare a driver for their new Z-Drive R3 series. However since they obviously faced some problems with an OSX driver I would not bet if they offer a driver at all, not to talk about a bootable version ....

 

[philipma1957]

I am trying to find such a product myself since a long time. OCZ was announcing a Mac OSX version of their Z-Drive R2 since middle of last year. But so far it was just vaporware. They removed the "OSX coming soon" from all of their Z-Drive product specs. So maybe they gave up on OSX or they prepare a driver for their new Z-Drive R3 series. However since they obviously faced some problems with an OSX driver I would not bet if they offer a driver at all, not to talk about a bootable version ....

I read a lot of the forums on OCZ's website not much good on them and mac osx lots of bricks crashes panic kernals. Ocz vertex was the first ssd to brick in one of my mac mini's.

 

[elvisizer]

i've got one of OCZ's Revodrive x2's in my pro. I'm using it as my Windows boot drive (i did have to put the Windows bootloader and BCD files on a normal hard drive so that the windows installation was visible to the EFI bootloader, but windows IS using the Revo as the boot partition . . .I have to say I was surprised to find the mac pro MB would support booting from PCI-E while in BIOS emulation mode) but there definitely is no support for booting from it under OS X. I am able to access the drive under OS X- I just loaded the RAID 5 sil 3124 driver for OS X, since that's the RAID chip on the revo. It caused issues with sleeping, though, so I uninstalled the driver and only use it under windows. Other than the sleep issues, writing and reading from the device under OS X didn't seem to have any issues. I got about the same performance under OS X and windows- about 695 MB per second for writes, 700-ish MB per second for reads.
yes, that is megabytes, not megabits.