Which is what I've done when installing Linux. Am I losing performance? Power efficiency? Features?
It also makes dual booting trickier if you don't plan it beforehand.
It frustrates me that there's not that many reviews that cover this kind of stuff, so it's hard to avoid silliness like this when making a substantial purchase like a laptop.
> Which is what I've done when installing Linux. Am I losing performance? Power efficiency? Features?
From what I read a year ago before doing this, you don't lose much, and software-based RAID (if you go for that sort of thing) in GNU/Linux is just as efficient/reliable, and maybe more so. And anyway, if you only have one HDD/SSD, there is no point in RAID.
> It also makes dual booting trickier if you don't plan it beforehand.
I don't think so: installing Windows will work just the same with Intel's RAID turned off.
Apparently, Intel's RST is not just RAID, but it's also supposed to help when a laptop is equipped with two storage devices, one small and fast (SSD) and another big but slower (HDD): https://superuser.com/a/1578326
IIRC there were Dell XPS models like that in the lower price segment. Never tried one personally.
It is simple enough to set up windows to use the normal boot rather than the RAID one. I've got my XPS set up with one drive in Linux, one in Windows - and boot into the drive I want to be in.
It also makes dual booting trickier if you don't plan it beforehand.
It frustrates me that there's not that many reviews that cover this kind of stuff, so it's hard to avoid silliness like this when making a substantial purchase like a laptop.