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Will my NVMe m.2 ssd work slower on Ubuntu than on windows?

ug flag

In the process of Ubuntu istallation I got a message to turn of RST (Rapid Storage Technology). As I understood, I should change it in BIOS on AHCI in order to install Ubuntu. Will this affect the performance of my ssd's?

Will avatar
id flag
Welcome to AU! Please confirm - are you planning on keeping Windows (ie dual boot) or using Ubuntu instead of Windows?
eresque- avatar
ug flag
No, I'm planning to use Ubuntu instead. Not dual boot
oldfred avatar
cn flag
If M.2 is NVMe, Ubuntu 22.04 will install Intel vmd driver which works with RAID on. I forgot to change my Dell 11 gen CPU based system to AHCI and it worked, which afterwards surprised me. Found it used vmd driver. May depend on version of Ubuntu and how old CPU is.
Will avatar
id flag
I suspect there may be a theoretical drop in performance. However, in practise, my experience has been that Ubuntu is *so* much faster than Windows on the systems I’ve tried both on, this will make any performance reduction due to the loss of RST functionality pale into insignificance. Not trying to rant about Windows, but my experience is that it slows down dramatically on anything other than very recent hardware and a very recent install. Conversely, Ubuntu 22.04LTS is running very nicely on a 2012 mid-range Asus laptop (so well I use it instead of a newer machine as it’s so light!).
Score:1
in flag

Intel's RST does not support Linux, which makes it a problematic thing to keep enabled if you plan on running Ubuntu natively. This document from Ubuntu goes through some of the details behind RST and Linux.

As for the question on performance, it should not affect performance at all. I have Lenovo and Dell machines where RST is disabled and can consistently get slightly faster speeds than I would if the machines were running some version of Windows (which I generally use only at first to benchmark before wiping the storage devices to install Ubuntu or another distribution). Without knowing specifically which hardware you are using, I cannot offer specific benchmarks, but they likely exist somewhere on the Internet.

So long as you do not have several storage devices configured as RAID via RST, Windows should not complain too much if you disable the feature and configure a multi-boot environment.

Will avatar
id flag
That’s a nice / useful article you link to!
I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

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