Future Windows 10 Builds Will Reserve Storage and Tabulate It

AlphaAtlas

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According to a recent Microsoft TechNet blog post, future versions of Windows 10 will automatically set aside several gigabytes of storage for updates and other Windows-related features. The post says that the reserved space will shrink the apparent size of regular, user accessible disk space, so don't be surprised if your SSD seems to shrink when you install a new Windows Insider build. While it's easy to point fingers at Microsoft and claim that Windows is unnecessarily eating up drive space, full system drives often create headaches for Windows Update, and this "reserved" space could finally alleviate that longstanding issue. In addition, the new build of Windows seems to have a "System & Reserved" settings menu that nicely tabulates just how much space Windows 10 is eating up, and the hibernation file is significantly smaller than the multi-gigabyte files on 2 desktops I just installed fresh copies of Windows 10 on. Thanks to Monkey34 for the tip.

Instead we designed an elegant solution that would require new support being added to NTFS. The idea is NTFS provides a mechanism for the servicing stack to specify how much space it needs reserved, say 7GB. Then NTFS reserves that 7GB for servicing usage only. What is the effect of that? Well the visible free space on C: drops by 7GB, which reduces how much space normal applications can use. Servicing can use those 7GB however. And as servicing eats into those 7GB, the visible free space on C: is not affected (unless servicing uses beyond the 7GB that was reserved). The way NTFS knows to use the reserved space as opposed to the general user space is that servicing marks its own files and directories in a special way. You can see that this mechanism has similar free space characteristics as using a separate partition or a VHDX, yet the files seamlessly live in the same namespace which is a huge benefit. It’s not quotas. Whereas quotas define the maximum amount of space a user can use, this mechanism is guaranteeing a minimum amount of space. It’s sort of the opposite of quotas.
 
I just want Windows to stop messing with my drive and repartitioning it.

I want a windows install with a single windows partition. None of this microsoft reserved garbage.

Not only does my Windows 10 install at home have two several hundred MB micorsoft reserved partitions, and the recovery partition I don't want. It also inserts a tiny little partition infront of every single NTFS partition that is INVISIBLE from within windows (WTF?) Open up any other operating system or rescue disk though and there they are.

I just want to get back to where I had control over my computer.

Single Windows partition. Nothing else. PLEASE!
 
I just want Windows to stop messing with my drive and repartitioning it.

I want a windows install with a single windows partition. None of this microsoft reserved garbage.

Not only does my Windows 10 install at home have two several hundred MB micorsoft reserved partitions, and the recovery partition I don't want. It also inserts a tiny little partition infront of every single NTFS partition that is INVISIBLE from within windows (WTF?) Open up any other operating system or rescue disk though and there they are.

I just want to get back to where I had control over my computer.

Single Windows partition. Nothing else. PLEASE!


Is that System Reserved hidden 100MB partition bothering you?
 
This policy will definitely assist with low storage solutions running windows. I had two HP stream 11 notebooks for my kids. They had 32GB of storage. At a point, windows couldn't install security updates because of lack of disk space. Feature updates were out of the question.
 
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I just want Windows to stop messing with my drive and repartitioning it.

I want a windows install with a single windows partition. None of this microsoft reserved garbage.

Not only does my Windows 10 install at home have two several hundred MB micorsoft reserved partitions, and the recovery partition I don't want. It also inserts a tiny little partition infront of every single NTFS partition that is INVISIBLE from within windows (WTF?) Open up any other operating system or rescue disk though and there they are.

I just want to get back to where I had control over my computer.

Single Windows partition. Nothing else. PLEASE!


Why I went back to windows 7
Windows 10 does not longer warning you about stuff it just takes control and does as it pleases...
delete software because it doesn liek it heck why not
changed networks settings because whatererv hades yes
install it own drivers without asking Hell yeah
 
It also inserts a tiny little partition infront of every single NTFS partition that is INVISIBLE from within windows (WTF?)
I notice a 100 MB EFI System Partition on all of mine, is that the partition you are talking about?
 
He's probably talking about these partitions. This is a fresh 1803 install from about a month ago (work laptop):

upload_2019-1-9_10-22-9.png
 
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Is that System Reserved hidden 100MB partition bothering you?


It's not just that. Modern partitioning schemes are a mess. I like them to be clean. On my windows 10 boot drive the partitioning scheme looks something like this after the latest Windows 10 Update.

1.) EFI Partition 99MB Fat 32 - This one is not Microsofts fault, but still bloody annoying. I wish we could just go back to the good old BIOS/MBR Scheme. It was much simpler. But no. If you want NVME, you need UEFI. I hate UEFI.

2.) Recovery Partition 450MB NTFS - I take regular disk images of my machine. If I want to recover it, I'll just boot from a rescue disk, and write my image. Please don't force this on me Microsoft.

3.) 16MB Mystery partition right infront of main NTFS partition. Gparted cant even move it because it is of unknown type. Every time I create a partition in Windows, this silently gets added infront of it, creating a mess, and what's worse it is INVISIBLE from inside windows. You'd never know it was there, unless you boot up from a linux rescue disk.

4.) Primary Windows Partition - 239.17 GB NTFS - Really the only partition I want.

5.) Microsoft Reserved 853MB NTFS - What is this partition here for? Nobody knows. Buffering my telemetry data maybe?

So, for a simple Windows install I have 5 partitions. I want it to be nice and clean and have one. So thats 4 extra partitions. 3 of them are Microsofts fault. One is the fault of UEFI. (Death to UEFI, I want NVME booting without UEFI)
 
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Why I went back to windows 7
Windows 10 does not longer warning you about stuff it just takes control and does as it pleases...
delete software because it doesn liek it heck why not
changed networks settings because whatererv hades yes
install it own drivers without asking Hell yeah

Personally I am very concerned that it just resizes and moves your partitions without warning or giving you a chance to back things up first.

One of these days someone is going wo wind up with a corrupted partition over this and lose all their shit. It has probably already happened many times.
 
BTW - Win 7 does the 100MB partition trick as well. And it gets really upset if the installer put it on drive 1 instead of drive 0 with the rest of the OS install and then drive 1 gets removed. Mine doesn't mention EFI as the MB predates that. Never seemed worth worrying about on a 128+G HD. But the installer putting it on the secondary drive is a PITA.
 
So not only did 1803 enable a service that automatically deletes stuff off your drives without telling you what they deleted, but now they want to reserve even more drive space without my permission? You'd better be able to turn it off like the former.
 
I don't mind if Windows wants to create a permanent service area for updates. But hopefully they clean up the space after the update finishes. Last thing we need is it filling up the service area, then deciding "hey, i need more space. I'll just hide another 7gb chunk to use".
 
It's not just that. Modern partitioning schemes are a mess. I like them to be clean. On my windows 10 boot drive the partitioning scheme looks something like this after the latest Windows 10 Update.

1.) Partition 99MB Fat 32 - This one is not Microsofts fault, but still bloody annoying. I wish we could just go back to the good old BIOS/MBR Scheme. It was much simpler. But no. If you want NVME, you need UEFI. I hate UEFI.

2.) Recovery Partition 450MB NTFS - I take regular disk images of my machine. If I want to recover it, I'll just boot from a rescue disk, and write my image. Please don't force this on me Microsoft.

3.) 16MB Mystery partition right infront of main NTFS partition. Gparted cant even move it because it is of unknown type. Every time I create a partition in Windows, this silently gets added infront of it, creating a mess, and what's worse it is INVISIBLE from inside windows. You'd never know it was there, unless you boot up from a linux rescue disk.

4.) Primary Windows Partition - 239.17 GB NTFS - Really the only partition I want.

5.) Microsoft Reserved 853MB NTFS - What is this partition here for? Nobody knows. Buffering my telemetry data maybe?

So, for a simple Windows install I have 5 partitions. I want it to be nice and clean and have one. So thats 4 extra partitions. 3 of them are Microsofts fault. One is the fault of UEFI. (Death to UEFI, I want NVME booting without UEFI)

1 Sounds like half your partition problems are self made. I have no idea what you did on 1
2 The recovery partition can be removed. Just delete it.
3 could be a partition alignment issue, idk. delete it and re-align
5 you might be able to remove - research it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reserved_Partition

you should back up your entire drive first of course, maybe dd it.
 
1 Sounds like half your partition problems are self made. I have no idea what you did on 1
2 The recovery partition can be removed. Just delete it.
3 could be a partition alignment issue, idk. delete it and re-align
5 you might be able to remove - research it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reserved_Partition

you should back up your entire drive first of course, maybe dd it.
Just because you can retroactively fix some of the fucked up shit of windows 10 doesn't mean the problems are self made.
 
Just because you can retroactively fix some of the fucked up shit of windows 10 doesn't mean the problems are self made.
1 was self made for sure. 3 is possibly self made. did you read the post?
 
I just bought a 1TB Corsair M.2 SSD and this is my first SSD. Not the first I've installed just the first I've owned cause I couldn't be bothered dealing with 250GB or less storage. It helps that 1TB is now $135. I just reinstalled Windows 10 and it took literally 1/4 of that 1TB storage, though admittedly I did install other things like Chocolatey along with a bunch of what I consider essential free apps. You know FireFox, Chrome, FileZilla, Putty, and of course Klite just to name a few.

So I can see why people who own 250GB or less SSD's might run into problems updating Windows 10. It doesn't help that some Windows 10 updates are like updating from Windows 7 to 10. Of course I have HDD drives for real storage, but you don't have this problem with Linux. Updating Ubuntu 18.04 to 18.04.1 doesn't require 7GB of storage, hell updating from 16.04 to 18.04 needs like a fraction of that. It's been said hundreds of times but Microsoft really needs to fix Windows update, it just sucks.
 
The problem isn't that they're doing this. The problem is that the 'power users' like us can't change settings like this. I think its disgusting. If you've paid for the software you should be able to set it up as you see fit.

As usual, MS will tell you what you want.
 
1 Sounds like half your partition problems are self made. I have no idea what you did on 1
2 The recovery partition can be removed. Just delete it.
3 could be a partition alignment issue, idk. delete it and re-align
5 you might be able to remove - research it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reserved_Partition

you should back up your entire drive first of course, maybe dd it.


Nope.

#1 is the EFI partition. My bad. I thought I had written that. It gets created to allow your operating system to boot if you use UEFI (which you have to in order to boot from NVMe drives, that's why I said it wasnt Microsofts fault)

#2 Yep, I know, an dI have, but I shouldn't have to do this. And sometimes these damned partitions just come back on their own (usually during build updates)

#3 Nope, these are new, and there on every machine I have checked. At least since 1803 (I think thats when it happened. And they werent there in the initial builds of Windows 10) You just cant see them from Windows because Microsoft hides them somehow. Boot up an ubuntu rescue thumbdrive and launch gparted and take a look for yourself.

#5 Yep, I did this. Again, this wasn't there before 1803. During that upgrade, Microsoft secretly resized my main partition and created it. Pisses me off. It will probably be back again next upgrade.


Yeah, always backup before messing with partitions. Pisses me off that Microsoft just resies and moves partitions without warning about a backup.

I usually dd mine directly to a file on my NAS before every major change.
 
1 Sounds like half your partition problems are self made. I have no idea what you did on 1
2 The recovery partition can be removed. Just delete it.
3 could be a partition alignment issue, idk. delete it and re-align
5 you might be able to remove - research it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Reserved_Partition

you should back up your entire drive first of course, maybe dd it.

1 is there because the PC uses UEFI, There is no way around it. It's not Zara's fault. The PC won't boot without it.
2 there's no point in removing it because all of the stupid extra windows partitions prevent you from resizing you main partition to utilize it without using special software.
5 " you might be able to remove it" doesn't really address that it shouldn't be there in the first place if windows doesn't need it.

it sounds to me like Zara gets it and you are the one talking out of their ass.
 
Nope.

#1 is the EFI partition. My bad. I thought I had written that. It gets created to allow your operating system to boot if you use UEFI (which you have to in order to boot from NVMe drives, that's why I said it wasnt Microsofts fault)

#2 Yep, I know, an dI have, but I shouldn't have to do this. And sometimes these damned partitions just come back on their own (usually during build updates)

#3 Nope, these are new, and there on every machine I have checked. At least since 1803 (I think thats when it happened. And they werent there in the initial builds of Windows 10) You just cant see them from Windows because Microsoft hides them somehow. Boot up an ubuntu rescue thumbdrive and launch gparted and take a look for yourself.

#5 Yep, I did this. Again, this wasn't there before 1803. During that upgrade, Microsoft secretly resized my main partition and created it. Pisses me off. It will probably be back again next upgrade.


Yeah, always backup before messing with partitions. Pisses me off that Microsoft just resies and moves partitions without warning about a backup.

I usually dd mine directly to a file on my NAS before every major change.


welp 3 out of 4 aint bad. good luck.
 
You can delete all but the EFI partition using software like MiniTool. In fact, I think you can delete that one, too...but you're not going to be able to boot.

It's still annoying that they're created automatically, but at least you can do something about it.
 
You want it to be "nice and clean". WTF does that even mean?
And how would having only 1 partition improve your computing experience, besides that it's what you "want".


Right now it is very tricky to resize partitions and make changes to my drive in a cros-platform environment because the messy junk Microsoft places on my drive.

For instance, those little 16mb partitions before every main NTFS partition created in Windows are of undetectable format. Because of this, nothing outside of Windows can move them.

Then there is the waste of space. I know a gig or so between the Microsoft reserved partition and the system restore partition isnt a huge amount of space these days, but it still bothers me.

Then there's also the fact that I don't know why these parititons are there. I need to know why they are there, what data they contain, and what purpose they serve for me to be comfortable with them.

Whats probably the worst part is that Microsoft is engaging in very risky behavior by resizing, moving and creating partitions on peoples computers without even telling them during build upgrade time. Everyone who has ever worked on a computer knows that if you care about a partitions content at all, you ALWAYS back it up before any resize or move operations.

Its also an annoyance. A ton of little partitions spread out everywhere is very messy and looks ugly.
 
Or, Microsoft could instead actually work on making their software not take up so much space on disk. It's pretty mad their software has such a large footprint considering most of it is code, and not multimedia assets.

I can understand a certain minimum, but it's pretty ridiculous.
 
So is this going to replace the Winsxs nightmare folder that is always bloated? Or the other folder used to store previous updates. No windows cleanup utilities do NOT free up this disk space every time. There has to be a better way as I don't remember wasting so much time on windows updates as I have with the last few Windows releases. I am a lazy gamer so kind of stuck with Windows, but "yum update" sure seems like a nice way to do things to me.
 
really uncalled for douche. again, thats what i get for trying to help. gfy in the nicest way possible.

yep, I'm the douche. It's not like you tried to blame Windows issues on someone else several times even tho you really just didn't know what you were talking about. Then called me a douche, then said gfys. Maybe keep your help to yourself next time if that's your idea of trying to help.
 
No thanks. I don't care how cheap SDDs have gotten, I'm not going to surrender 7GB as a bandaid for Microsoft's technical ineptitude and make it easier for MS to force convert my PC to a bugged new build I didn't ask for - and thought I blocked in a GPO policy they intentionally ignored.

I swear, keeping your PC safe from Microsoft meddling these days is like trying to keep knives out of the hands of children.
 
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yep, I'm the douche. It's not like you tried to blame Windows issues on someone else several times even tho you really just didn't know what you were talking about. Then called me a douche, then said gfys. Maybe keep your help to yourself next time if that's your idea of trying to help.
Just stop acting like a child, being insulting and sidetracking the thread. You started the name calling and I am merely defending myself. I have offered ideas, and 3 of 4 appear to at least be relevant. What is your contribution?
 
I don't think you were ever called and name. Just called out for being wrong before you lost your shit.

Thanks for letting me use the ignore function today, I guess you did a make useful contribution to the thread.
 
Personally I am very concerned that it just resizes and moves your partitions without warning or giving you a chance to back things up first.

One of these days someone is going wo wind up with a corrupted partition over this and lose all their shit. It has probably already happened many times.

and then they are going to be alle like: Why didnt you uploaud YOUR files to the one driver. we need to analyse. i meant keep them safe.
 
I am personally ok with them reserving space if it means an update "borked things" it becomes a few minutes of your time a few simple clicks and you are back up and running, you can make yourself a note in this "folder" of what to avoid etc. without a person having to jump through hoops to do such a backup otherwise.

I think used intelligently, this is not a bad thing, hell I think smartphones should be doing this by all makers, that is, prior to update it uses 1-4gb of storage (something like that) do the system update "aww crap it messed things up" do a simple "click" and it restores to previous version with no changes made to system (like notes, contacts etc)
 
He's probably talking about these partitions. This is a fresh 1803 install from about a month ago (work laptop):

View attachment 133927

I am guessing you used a installation disk provided by your Laptops manufacture. Those are not fresh install media and have customizations built into the OS from the OEM. This is my guess as to why you have that 4th 900MB partition. As with a true fresh install of Windows (using the media creation tool to create a USB install media), you will only have three partitions.

First is the 500MB recovery partition, which you cannot delete as this is where the Windows 10 recovery tools and alternate boot options live.

Second is the UEFI partition which is required for UEFI bios. (it even exist in UEFI compatible linux distros and MAC OSX).

Third will be your Data partition. (unless configured other wise)

If you have anymore than these, you did not perform a fresh install of Windows 10. This is the same for Windows 8 and all version of Windows 10 up to version 1809. Below is a screen shot of one of my Intel Hades Canyon NUC that I just performed a fresh install of Windows 10 1809 this week with all drivers and Windows updates as of yesterday.

I just bought a 1TB Corsair M.2 SSD and this is my first SSD. Not the first I've installed just the first I've owned cause I couldn't be bothered dealing with 250GB or less storage. It helps that 1TB is now $135. I just reinstalled Windows 10 and it took literally 1/4 of that 1TB storage, though admittedly I did install other things like Chocolatey along with a bunch of what I consider essential free apps. You know FireFox, Chrome, FileZilla, Putty, and of course Klite just to name a few.

If your fresh Windows install takes up 1/4 of your 1TB SSD space, then you did not do a fresh install. A base windows install with no updates or drivers is around 17GB depending on install type and version. After updates and drivers, the install foot print should be anywhere from 22GB-30GB approximantly. Anything beyond that, there is an issue.

As for Microsoft adding this ability to Windows, it will be a big help for us in the support field. I hope they also add an option to purge all system, drivers and update stores that are no longer needed. This was a major issue in Windows 7 as it's system stores would just keep growing, especially its driver stores. I have seen Windows 7 System directories at 70+ GB before.

Also this is not just a Microsoft issue, ALL OS reserve system and other utility spaces including Linux. Just some are way better at managing and house cleaning it than others.
 

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I am very excited about this. It will stop users from filling their local OS drive storage to the point where monthly Windows updates fail. Less work for me...

7GB sounds a little conservative though since servicing updates can take more than that, but it's good for the monthly updates at any rate.
 
This update has me split, the network admin in me appriciates less issues in the long run with constant updates and those clients still running off a 128GB SSD but the personal home user in me has me a bit skeptic of this move. I think better for corporate world like bring this feature to Enterprise, maybe leave Home and Professional alone perhaps.
 
This policy will definitely assist with low storage solutions running windows. I had two HP stream 11 notebooks for my kids. They had 32GB of storage. At a point, windows couldn't install security updates because of lack of disk space. Feature updates were out of the question.

WTF is a "low storage solution?" If your low on storage, it's not a 'solution.' And the OS should know that before it goes and tries to install any more Candy Crush.
 
Yes, it's in the latest Fast Ring build (18312). What this does a lot of is replace many of the functions of CCleaner without the granularity. I keep Storage Sense turned off, too.
 
I just bought a 1TB Corsair M.2 SSD and this is my first SSD. Not the first I've installed just the first I've owned cause I couldn't be bothered dealing with 250GB or less storage. It helps that 1TB is now $135. I just reinstalled Windows 10 and it took literally 1/4 of that 1TB storage, though admittedly I did install other things like Chocolatey along with a bunch of what I consider essential free apps. You know FireFox, Chrome, FileZilla, Putty, and of course Klite just to name a few.

So I can see why people who own 250GB or less SSD's might run into problems updating Windows 10. It doesn't help that some Windows 10 updates are like updating from Windows 7 to 10. Of course I have HDD drives for real storage, but you don't have this problem with Linux. Updating Ubuntu 18.04 to 18.04.1 doesn't require 7GB of storage, hell updating from 16.04 to 18.04 needs like a fraction of that. It's been said hundreds of times but Microsoft really needs to fix Windows update, it just sucks.

You have to be doing more than just a 'few' extra things. My work lappy has a 250 GB SSD. Shows as 237GB usable space. I currently have 150GB free space. This machine has Windows 10 1803 along with all of Office 2016, Visio, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Hyper-V (the VMs are on another drive though), various PowerShell extensions, the Arduino IDE and a bunch of extra libraries, KiCAD EDA, a model railroad 3D CAD program, CHrome, Gimp, and various other things. And the cache for OneDrive. ANd I still have 150GB free. It's using 86GB. How in the heck did you suck up 250GB for just what you have listed? Something does not add up. I was running 250GB SSDs for a long time, in fact I only recently replaced the 256GB in my main desktop with a 512GB - and that one even has some games installed, still more than 50% free on the 512, the 256 wasn;t even full, with much the same installed software as the laptop, PLUS several games.
 
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