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Edit: recap: RST has been disabled in the firmware settings, RST driver has been uninstalled from Windows and the disks have been unpartitioned individually in Linux. Yet, Windows treats two disks as a single RAID 1 volume.
Original question:
I have a motherboard that provided Intel RST RAID to the computer. Because the computer kept freezing a couple times a month for no good reason, I started taking out one thing at a time to figure out the cause.
After disabling RST in the motherboard settings, Windows still saw the RST RAID 1 volume. After removing the Intel RST driver from Windows, Windows still saw the RAID 1 volume. It is currently visible in Device Manager as "Intel Raid 1 Volume". When I boot the same computer to Fedora and look at the disks with GNOME Disk Utility, I can see two physical hard drives, both having a 17MB partition in the beginning, which Linux states is an Intel Enterprice RAID volume.
Is it that 17MB partition that allows Windows to keep using this RAID volume as a RAID volume, despite the fact that RST is disabled in the motherboard's firmware settings and the controller is in AHCI mode (no, it is not; see edit)? Is Windows actually treating the disks as a RAID volume? Is it Storage Spaces that does this (although it does not show the volume)? Or is Windows simply looking like it is treating the RAID volume as a RAID volume and, in reality, just using one of the disks?
UPDATE: Even after deleting the 17MB partitions on the disks and leaving nothing left, Windows still thinks they constitute a single RAID unit. What is going on?