Biggest mistake leadership made was letting me name this project!
The investigation started when our support queue was getting hammered with certain devices always having their hard drive full. Even after removing as much bloat as possible these drives were still bothering us with automated alerts about low disk space.
Finally, I called up a user with one of these troublesome laptops and I dug in. After using WINDIRSTAT to see where all of this 256GB of storage space was going I noticed my math was not adding up. The total data was not even close to 256…it was closer to 128.
I helped the user navigate to BIOS and discovered that all of these devices were sent out with RAID set-up… on a laptop. Yikes.
I then ran a script to find all of these older devices with RAID enabled. Exported the list. And targeted the top ones to get a new laptop without RAID enabled.
Whoever at Dell decided that RAID would be enabled by default on these devices needs to be taken out back…and slapped!