I don't know anything about Intel VMD and have no idea what it is. I updated my Windows 11 on my ASUS laptop and after restart I get into blue screen and I did everything but none of it worked. I disabled VMD in boot settings and Windows finally came up. I want to know if I should turn it back on or not? I heard if I turn it back on it goes to blue screen again and the only way is to reinstall Windows. If I keep the VMD off what will happen?
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Intel Volume Management Device (VMD) is specifically designed for enterprise-grade management of NVMe SSDs connected to Intel Xeon CPUs. It is mostly aimed at making RAID I/O more efficient.
When you disable VMD, your disks use plain NVMe, which is perhaps what you need.
To summarize, this technology is most likely useless for your purpose, so can stay disabled, especially if your computer doesn't work well when it's enabled.
harrymc
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If you have a single disk (or SSD), you don't need VMD; if you have two or more disks, you might want to use VMD (when intending to use a RAID). However the disks have to be converted to be RAID members (read: data loss!) in BIOS, and Windows has to be re-installed (unless you want to mess with drivers in the boot loader when Windows won't boot).
Also even latest Windows 11 installation media (as of August 2024) lacks the driver, so you must download the driver to a separate medium and unpack it (see Step 3 in How to Enable Intel® VMD Capable Platforms for RAID or Intel® Optane™ Memory Configuration with the Intel® RST Driver) before you start the Windows installation.
One advantage I could think of is the ability to configure two logical RAID volumes (of the same type) on one physical RAID, so if you want to install two different operating systems, then each one can have it own "disk", Then if BIOS allows selection of the boot disk, you may not need to mess with the multi-boot loader configuration to be able to select which OS to boot.
U. Windl
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