Microsoft has added storage health monitoring to Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20226. The latest Windows build available for Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel also includes a few improvements within Notepad, File Explorer, DNS Settings, Microsoft Edge, Task Manager, etc.
Microsoft Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20226 Health Monitoring Feature:
The Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20226 has been released to the participants of the Windows Insider Program. Starting with this version, Windows 10 will alert users of any hardware issues affecting the health of storage drives. Microsoft has been working on a new feature for Windows 10 that aims to detect hardware problems for storage drives. If hardware problems are suspected or detected, Windows 10 will notify users before drive failure and consequential data loss. At present, the new Storage monitoring feature is limited to NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) Solid State Drives (SSDs) only. In other words, users of Windows 10 who rely on traditional hard drives or standard SATA SSD to boot and run the operating system, will not be able to benefit from the feature.
— HotHardware (@HotHardware) October 1, 2020 In addition to alerting about possible failure in the near future, the new feature will also provide critical drive health information such as estimated remaining operating life, available space, and the NVMe SSD devices’ temperatures. Windows 10 OS users will be automatically notified when the free storage capacity is getting dangerously low; if the SSD’s reliability is severely degraded due to “significant media-related errors or an internal error to the NVM subsystem. Although redundant, the feature will also notify users if the NVMe SSD is set to read-only preventing the OS or the user to write to it. The notification will appear in the standard Windows 10 New Notification Area on the right side of the screen above quick settings. Users can either click on the message or go to Start > Settings > System > Storage > Manage disks and volumes, then select Properties for the problematic disk to get additional details about the detected irregularities. Windows Insider Program senior program manager Brandon LeBlanc clarified, “This feature is designed to detect hardware abnormalities for NVMe SSDs and notify users with enough time to act. It is strongly recommended that users immediately back up their data after receiving a notification.”
Microsoft Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20226 Additional Features:
In addition to the Storage Health Monitoring Feature, Microsoft has made several small tweaks and improvements within Windows 10. Here’s a small list of the same:
We’re starting to roll out a change that will turn off theme syncing. As part of that, you will no longer see “Theme” as an option in Sync your settings, and changes made to your background will not sync across the device. If you have been using theme synchronization, when setting up a new PC or account there will be a one-time download of the last saved synchronized desktop background to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WallpaperBackup if you need to access it.Thanks for your patience – after making some reliability improvement, we’re re-enabling the ability for Notepad windows to persist update and restart (if “Restart apps” is enabled in Sign-in Settings).When you have a PWA installed from Microsoft Edge, Task Manager will now correctly display it under Applications instead of Background Processes in the Processes tab and will show the app icon associated with the PWA.We’re updating File Explorer so that if you right-click on a zipped OneDrive file that was set to online-only, you’ll now see an Extract All option, same as if the file was available locally on the PC.We’re updating the new DNS options in settings to make a static DNS required when entering a static IP, and to make gateway, not a required field.We’re updating the N’Ko keyboard layout so that pressing Shift + 6 will now insert ߾ (U+07FE ) and pressing Shift + 7 will now insert ߿ (U+07FF).
Windows Insider in the Dev Channel can update to the Insider Preview Build 20226 by going into Settings -> Update & Security -> Windows Update and then checking for new updates.
