Microsoft is Testing New Storage and Phone Features in Windows 10
A new Windows 10 Insider Preview build offers our first peek at new storage health monitoring and Your Phone features.
“Today we’re releasing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20226 to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel,” the latest Windows Insider blog post notes. “Storage health monitoring to protect user data … [is] new in build 20226.”
This new feature is designed to “detect hardware abnormalities in NVMe-based SSDs and notify users [so that they have] enough time to act,” Microsoft says. “It is strongly recommended that users immediately back up their data after receiving a notification.”
It looks like Microsoft is adding a “Drive health” section to the properties page about each storage device in your PC in Settings > System > Storage > Manage disks and volumes > Properties. This section will warn you that “reliability is degraded” and recommend that you back up the data on the drive in case of failure.
Aside from that, build 20226 also provides a new Your Phone feature that will help users manage their linked devices directly in the app, which is a major improvement over what is now an annoyance. From a new settings page in the app called My Devices, you can now link a new device, remove an old device, or switch between active devices. Nice.