On Saturday, 5 June 2021 08:32:47 BST Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Jun 2021 22:10:10 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > > I always boot system rescue and dd the entries drive to somewhere
> > > safe. That way I restore the original setup in the case of a warranty
> > > claim - unless the failure is that bad that I can't boot or access
> > > the disk.
> > >
> > a) The drive is one terabyte in size.
>
> Most of is empty, the drives always compress to a lot less.
>
> > b) Yes, Mr. Dell Support, I bought the machine 6 months ago and I've
> >
> > been websurfing, Youtubing, etc ever since. And Windows Home has not
> > forced an update all that time.
>
> That would be difficult but no evidence of any evil doing, such as
> installing Linux. However, I'm more concerned about an earlier failure,
> if it lasts six months it should last six years.
Back to the original question:
I've not had a Dell with this option yet, but I understand Dell uses RAID with
NVMe drives because it allows Intel RST drivers to work with most/all NVMe
drives. I'm not sure if any of the Dell onboard software to restore the Win10
OS also depend on this. Once you initialize the OS I think you won't be able
to run it in a different mode.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/why-does-dell-set-the-bios-to-raid-always.832016/ However, I've seen it mentioned in various places Linux will not be able to
see the drive if RAID is selected - I don't know if this is still the case.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/Pros-Cons-AHCI-vs-Raid-On-XPS13-9300-NVMe/ td-p/7636984