# Use mSATA drive to boot operating system from

## MalleRIM

Hi!

I am planning to buy the Lenovo Thinkpad E330 that (if I'm not wrong) comes with an mSATA port. I want to get a 128GB mSATA SSD as well and install the operating system on it. The hardware maintainance manual says the following:

 *Quote:*   

> Important:
> 
> • If the computer is equipped with both a hard disk drive and an mSATA solid-state drive, do not use the
> 
> mSATA solid-state drive as a bootable device. The mSATA solid-state drive is designed and developed for
> ...

 

Does this mean, it will only work for caching or cause problems if used otherwise? Or is this warning only for those versions shipping with an SSD, possibly with an operating system installed, that will not work correctly anymore after changes to the SSD? If the SSD won't be bootable, I can have a boot partition on the HDD although I'd prefer not to because I want to encrypt the whole drive without partitioning

The model I want to buy is NZS96GE. Does this even come with the mSATA slot? I couldn't find any information on that, although some almost identical models have an mSATA drive, a WWAN card or can be upgraded to either.

Cheers,

Malle

P.S.: the operating system will most probably be Gentoo Linux. Or possibly another Linux distribution

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## EatMeerkats

You should be able to treat it just like a normal drive/SSD… I've had both Windows and Gentoo on my mSATA drive in my ThinkPad X220 for about a year now.

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## MalleRIM

HMM for your laptop says:

 *Quote:*   

> If your computer is shipped with an mSATA drive and a solid state drive or hard disk drive, the mSATA drive
> 
> will be seen as hard disk 0 in the system, and assigned drive C:. The solid state drive or hard disk drive will
> 
> be seen as hard disk 1, and assigned drive D:. The mSATA drive is installed in the wireless WAN card slot of
> ...

 

That obviously wouldn't be an issue. But I was just thinking. If the port the mSATA drive is connected to is standardized, it should work, no matter what, right?

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## EatMeerkats

I would think so… plus, if you're installing your own mSATA drive, the one you install presumably wouldn't be designed and developed for cache function purpose only?

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## MalleRIM

No, of course not. Just in case I sent an email to lenovo. They should know. I will update here as soon as they replied.

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## eccerr0r

I have an Ultrabook that has the same chipset (HM77/PP).

While I don't think it's a problem to boot off of the mPCIe port if it has one, there's one technical problem:

The regular SATA port is port 0, and the mPCIe is port 1, and they can't be swapped.  Default is to boot port 0.

The only thing that I haven't tried (since I had no need to) is to change boot order.  I think this should be possible to do in BIOS.

Since this is a cache system, you need to disable a lot of stuff before using it.

1. In Windows, disable Intel Smart Response using the Intel tool installed on the laptop.  I think first you have to stop the raid0 and then disassociate it from the root disk.

2. In BIOS, change the SATA mode from Intel Rapid Storage to AHCI or regular ATA.  This is the somewhat tricky step.

At this point the mPCIe disk will become its own disk and you can store what you want on it.  This is, of course, it comes set up as a cache.

I really wish I could just use ISR directly with Linux, but there's no driver yet apparently...

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## MalleRIM

Lenovo support said the cache cant be deactivated but appearanty they are idiots. The laptop arrived and I'm installing Gentoo on the SSD while I'm typing this. Not yet sure if it can be booted from, but I think that should be possible.

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