Hi all,
I've had a Gigabyte Aorus X5 laptop since the end of 2015. This laptop runs the intel "HM97" chipset. Over the past couple of months I've been dealing with Gigabyte support trying to get them to replace the laptop under warranty because it has recently started killing M.2 SSD drives that are installed.
The laptop shipped with two M.2 SSDs configured in RAID 0. When the first one died I didn't think much of it, but payed for shipping back to gigabyte to have the drive swapped as the laptop is still within warranty. They swapped the drives, reconfigured the RAID 0, reinstalled windows 10 and mailed it back to me. However, less than two hours after opening the box and starting the laptop up again, one of the M.2 drives failed again! When I say the drives were killed, I mean they don't even show up in BIOS.
When I sent the laptop back to gigabyte, they were planning on just swapping the drives again and sending it back, however I stopped them and requested the look into why the drives were burning out in the first place instead. The technician apparently contacted their engineering department and was told the following:
"Upon further checking with repair center engineers and the supervisor this is what I got. The laptop chipset will now cause problems when running in raid mode due to intel’s discontinue support for windows 10. After applying new patches it will cause the SSD to read and write on one part of the sector only which will cause system fail in the long run. Intel has notified us to explain that raid is no longer supported. According to the repair center engineer it is recommended to run the laptop in single SSD to avoid additional problems since windows will automatically update to the most up to date patch."
Now, I'm not sure if I need to break it down for you guys or if you can see the red-flags already... But he is claiming an Intel Chipset that is not end-of-life status is causing the problems when running RAID with windows 10 and additionally that intel "discontinue support" for windows 10...
This is a complete fabrication, right? How could intel just write off support for a (relatively) modern chip-set on the current version of windows? When I pressed him for more detail he "checked with HQ" and replied as follows:
"Dear XXXXX,
Also just to inform you that I meant the laptop no longer supports Raid 0 in Windows 10 as Intel discontinues support for the platform on windows 10. It does have support on windows 8.1 which the laptop was shipped with. I will have the HQ and repair center look into possibilities on how it will work and operate in windows 10 with Raid enabled as this is a problem with compatibility with Microsoft and intel due to EOL support."
Whaaat?! So now he's saying intel is supporting the chipset but only on an older operating system? Does any of this make sense to anyone out there, or does it just reek of them trying to get out of replacing the laptop? To be clear, this is not the first issue I've had with the laptop, there's been hardware and software issues since about a month after I bought it.
Has anyone here heard of any compatibility issues with the HM97 (H97M) chipset, RAID, and windows 10 updates?