ROG Strix Scar 18 2025 - disable VMD or use IRST drivers ?

[Alex_owlbear]

Hello , I recently bought the ROG Strix Scar 18 - G835LW  with no OS , RTX 5080 and 2 TB SSD.

 Since it came without an OS I used a new bootable USB with Win11 and when the installation could not detect the SSD I checked guide that came with the laptop box that sent me to this page https://www.asus.com/us/support/faq/1044458/  which showed me 2 methods to detect the SSD and install Windows. I went with the second option since it was faster and disabled VMD in the bios and then my SSD was visible in the Windows installation screen. After that everything proceeded normally ,  I installed windows , drivers etc. 

My question is more out of curiosity , is there any difference between installing Windows with VMD disabled or keeping VMD enabled and using the IRST drivers ? Like is there any difference in performance, boot times etc or anything else I should be aware of ? 

If I ever want to reformat the laptop and reinstall Windows should I try out the IRST drivers or just keep VMD disabled ? 

[tesma]

Hi there, no real performance or boot-time difference between disabling VMD and using the standard NVMe driver or keeping VMD enabled and loading Intel’s IRST driver. VMD mainly matters if you plan to use RAID, or advanced storage management features. If you’re cool with your config you can safely keep VMD disabled. Plus I was in the same situation when i received back my Strix G16 from the support, I could not detect my ssd partion during w11 setup because of that VMD thing... the reason you couldn’t see the SSD partition at first was because VMD was enabled. Disabling it bypassed the Intel controller layer and let Windows talk directly to the drive.

[Alex_owlbear]

Good to know ! I'm happy with my current config so I'll leave VMD disabled. I might want to add another 2 TB SSD in the future if storage becomes a problem, but so far so good. Thanks for the answer !