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Nosing around in the UEFI (Bios) of my laptop I noticed a setting for Intel VMD controller. It was disabled. Rumor has it:
Can anyone confirm these assumptions?
Mike
I’d wonder what sort of laptop you have. I asked Google as I had not seen this one – it seems to be a server orientated technology in Xeon processors:
“Intel® VMD is an Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor feature that enables direct control and management of NVMe SSDs from the PCIe bus without additional hardware adaptors. ”
from
That said given the “level” of the device I’d also anticipate the driver for that would be offered at DXE level (that is to say, through UEFI boot drivers) as it’s not fun building in mass storage drivers into all your media. Basically it needs a “firmware hard disk controller”.. as to what / which I don’t know!
I’d also anticipate though possible it seems unlikely you’d have two populated SSD slots in a laptop to even be able to evaluate if the setting can be activated ( as RAID seems to be the target, and in the likely absence of a suitable processor).. so I’d have to suggest stay with the default settings makes sense.. I’d postulate someone slipped up and didn’t remove the option from the BIOS settings menu, which indicates maybe you haven’t the latest BIOS on offer..
Just for fun, found one of the machines in the series “roughly as described” used an I7 10750H, no mention of VMD on that information page..
As there is no simplistic way to equate the I7 and Xeon processors, I just picked the top of the list of the Xeon third gen range – it’s specifically mentioned if the processor has the function on the spec page, so that’s probably what to check for (should your processor be different) before trying the setting. (for the Xeon chip I picked, the information is buried at the bottom of the advanced technologies section half way down the page below.)
It would be tempting to pull the drivers from the Lenovo install media (as it must have them in its boot image to mount the drives with VMD active), and then import them into a standard Windows media and see how far you can get installing from that. It is however also plausible they added a UEFI boot signature for their media which causes the firmware to retain the VMD controller activity and trust the driver (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/oem-secure-boot)
That would tell you if its “all in the drivers” or if the Windows install has to be subtly tweaked somehow to enable it to continue setup in the absence of a traditional “mass storage controller”
As to the last bit, you’ve got a bit crossed on the functions. AHCI is Advanced Host Controller Interface. In plain English, Windows doesn’t need to determine exactly which track and sector the destination LBA is at and tell the drive to go there and then what to write, Windows just effectively says what data to what LBA and the controller and drive sorts the rest so Windows can get on with the important stuff..
RAID0 is a disk usage method – it determines how you spread the data across the drives you have when you have more than one in a machine. You could have redundancy, but lose capacity, or visa versa. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID for detail..
You won’t be able to simply change RAID mode afterwards as the data representing your installation needs to be organised differently across the drives in differing RAID configurations (as I hope the previous article clarifies) and I suspect the drive would be in AHCI mode regardless of the RAID configuration as most modern machines don’t give that option as increasingly they operate a UEFI boot process for security reasons. If you manage to turn that off I suspect most if the options as far as configuration will evaporate..
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