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Can I boot off a PCI-e storage device?
- Thread starter sphinx99
- Start date
PCIe is an interface, whether or not you can boot from it depends on the device attached to the interface. As stated above, many types of RAID controllers designed for PCIe are bootable, however others are not. This mainly depends on whether or not the manufacturers added a boot ROM to the device.
As for whether or not it will become a new storage interface - this doesn't really make sense. In many ways, it is ALREADY a stroage interface - in essence your onboard SATA controller (usually the southbridge) is attached to the northbridge via a modified PCIe link. Any RAID controllers are similarly attached, either directly to the northbridge or via the southbridge. PCIe is really just a way of moving data around between the different hardware parts inside the PC. In essence it doesn't really matter if this is graphics data, network traffic or storage data, it just uses a serial interface to pass back and forth between the components.
The reason why we are starting to see more and more PCIe storage devices is simply because the PCIe interface is now fast enough to make it worthwhile. When ISA or PCI were the main interfaces they were capable of much lower speeds than those utilising onboard IDE/SATA ports. Now PCIe is not a bottleneck it allows RAID cards, SSDs etc to become more useful as they are not limited by the 133MB/s PCI bus. As disks are much faster and cheaper than they have ever been, it is now reasonable to buy a few and RAID them together to take advantage of the high speed processors we have now. Over PCI this was not really viable - nobody wants to buy 2 disks capable of 100MB/s each, only to find the PCI bus limits their RAID speed to around 60MB/s.
Hope this helps
As for whether or not it will become a new storage interface - this doesn't really make sense. In many ways, it is ALREADY a stroage interface - in essence your onboard SATA controller (usually the southbridge) is attached to the northbridge via a modified PCIe link. Any RAID controllers are similarly attached, either directly to the northbridge or via the southbridge. PCIe is really just a way of moving data around between the different hardware parts inside the PC. In essence it doesn't really matter if this is graphics data, network traffic or storage data, it just uses a serial interface to pass back and forth between the components.
The reason why we are starting to see more and more PCIe storage devices is simply because the PCIe interface is now fast enough to make it worthwhile. When ISA or PCI were the main interfaces they were capable of much lower speeds than those utilising onboard IDE/SATA ports. Now PCIe is not a bottleneck it allows RAID cards, SSDs etc to become more useful as they are not limited by the 133MB/s PCI bus. As disks are much faster and cheaper than they have ever been, it is now reasonable to buy a few and RAID them together to take advantage of the high speed processors we have now. Over PCI this was not really viable - nobody wants to buy 2 disks capable of 100MB/s each, only to find the PCI bus limits their RAID speed to around 60MB/s.
Hope this helps