Mechanisms for efficient discovery of storage resources in a Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) system and associated methods, apparatus, and systems. A rack is populated with pooled system drawers including pooled compute drawers and pooled storage drawers communicatively coupled via input-output (IO) cables. Compute nodes including one or more processors, memory resources, and optional local storage resources are installed in the pooled compute drawers, and are enabled to be selectively-coupled to storage resources in the pooled storage drawers over virtual attachment links. During a discovery process, a compute node determines storage resource characteristics of storage resources it may be selectively-coupled to and the attachment links used to access the storage resources. The storage resource characteristics are aggregated by a pod manager that uses corresponding configuration information to dynamically compose compute nodes for rack users based on user needs.
