Previously, 32-bit Windows had a minimum storage requirement of 16GB, and 64-bit Windows needed 20GB. Both of these were extremely tight, leaving little breathing room for actual software, but technically this was enough space for everything to work. That minimum has now been bumped up: it’s 32GB for both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows.
Part of this growth may be due to a new behavior that Microsoft is introducing with version 1903. To ensure that future updates install without difficulty, 7GB of disk space are permanently reserved for the install process. While this will avoid out-of-disk errors when updating, it represents a substantial reduction in usable space on these low-storage systems.
It’s remarkable just how much space a default Windows installation takes up – and it’s even worse just how hard it has become on Windows to even properly find out where all that space is going as your machine starts to rack up the months or even years of use. While other modern operating systems such as Linux or macOS may not be as bad as Windows, they, too are starting to treat disk space like a commodity, and they, too, can be difficult to manage.
But surely disk space is a commodity, even my RaspberryPi comes bundled with a 32GB SD card, and my iPhone as 256GB built in storage. The IIoT devices I develop usually use 16GB cards as the minimum, in fact my supplier doesn’t stock smaller, so I don’t get the complaint! It feels like an all change is bad type discussion, when surely cheap abundant storage is actually good!
I realise some will go down the path of utilitarian efficiency and resources, but the that is truly a different debate!
The problem is, there are many cheap laptops, tablets and convertibles with Windows 10 preinstalled out there which are quite ok but have very limited amounts of non-upgradeable eMMC storage. I myself actually got one such device (the only machine in my household I didn’t convert to Linux yet because of poor driver support), and I’m already eagerly awaiting the May update…
Completely agree.
Another plus side is it stops manufacturers ruining the expirience for users by putting out 00s hardware in an attempt to cut corners. My iBook g4 had this much hdd space back in 2005, there is no good reason a modern machine (even low end) should have less.
@Adurbe: “There is no good reason a modern machine (even low end) should have less” – well, but there is no good reason a modern machine should necessarily require more, either, unless the OS is hungry for an amount of mass storage that is an order of magnitude larger than it would be necessary from an objective technical standpoint..
Let us not get outraged before we consider what is being described:
Keep in mind that the 16/20 GB and now 32 GB is disk space for the whole system which includes
base operating system + user space + virtual memory+disk reserve for install.
The quote is for system total requirement and describes a bare minimum necessary for a minimal system like a kiosk, embedded system or other single or fixed use function where you may consider installing on an SD card or other low cost device.
“Real” User experiences have much greater user space requirements – Frequently on the order of 256 to 512 GB and now a days terabyte disk drives dedicated to mainly user-oriented videos/photos.
4 GB Ram -> 4 to 8 GB disk for Virtual Memory
7 GB Reserve (To prevent hangs due to too little user space)
10 GB User Space
—–
7-11 GB for base Operating system.
Those are respectable numbers for Android and iOS as much as a full operating system.
Truth be told — Memory (disk and RAM) and computer capacity is a commodity now. Terabyte drives for $75 retail and 64 RAM for similar. Even 5 year old consumer laptops and computers have capacity for 8 to 16 GB RAM and PCIe terabyte drives.
Speaking as someone who used to have to dial in the volume on their cassette recorder so that programs would save and load accurately at 150 baud, and who still occasionally uses single-character variable names because 4 kilobytes wasn’t much to program in…
I can buy a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive for < $10 USD, and a high quality 32GB SD card for around the same. A 32GB SSD is less than $20 USD. A 7200 RPM 1TB drive can be had for < $50 (that's $0.05 / GB).
Disk space *IS* a commodity, and a cheap one. If you've got a computer capable of running Windows 10, stop being so effin' cheap on the storage. Stop trying to run modern linux on a computer you scavenged while dumpster diving in 1996– the Raspberry Pi 3 will run circles around it while using less power.
Now, if you want to complain about storage on Android phones still being ridiculously small and inscrutable, I'm all over it.
Android phones have ridiculously small storage? Unless you are buying a $100 phone 64GB is the standard low end storage amount which would be enough to install Windows 10. LOL I would have agreed if you had said Chromebooks. I have little need for a lot of storage on my phone.
Not sure where you’re buying phones, but in the USA, I couldn’t find one for under $500 with more than 32GB of RAM– admittedly, I’m just browsing AT&T’s site, which isn’t the most representative. Sure, the new flagship phones have 128GB (or more), but they also cost over $1,000.
Ummmm I am in the US and took 10 seconds to Google to find the Nokia 7.1 with 64GB of storage at Best Buy for $299 and works on AT&T. It even gets updates…
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/nokia-7-1-with-64gb-memory-cell-phone-unlocked-blue/6291898.p?skuId=6291898
OnePlus 6T with 256GB of storage is $629 and works on AT&T. It also gets updates.
https://www.oneplus.com/oneplus-6t?from=6t
This will cause an issue with some SoCs with embedded storage – previously, Atom SoCs, and lately ARM – without upgradable storage, but otherwise plenty of power.
However, if you take a low to mid range computer from 5 years ago, Windows 10 still requires a roughly equal share of disk space as Windows 3.1 did on mid-range computers when it was released.
Windows 10 is also somewhat more capable.
Windows 3.1 came on 7 floppies and required DOS which came on 3 floppies. Together they took up > 10 MB of my total 20 MB on a 286. A typical system at that time was a 386 with 40 MB and a brand new system would be a 486 with 80 MB. We were using tools like doublespace/drivespace/stacker to make all our software and games fit and I ran defrag for hours. My biggest personal files would be a couple of Word Perfect documents of a few KB. Software was completely dominating the storage and I constantly ran out of all resources
Nowadays my own files take up a much larger part of the storage and contains mostly binary audio/video/photoos that is only cached locally but primarily stored in the cloud. The OS+Programs+Games only takes up a small percentage of my storage
6 and 2 disks for 90% of sets. Even for 3.11 and 6.22.
I have no idea what you mean with “for 90% of sets”, but even for 1.44 MB floppies you would need 8+3 and for the 1.2 MB that I had it was 9+3. I also think it is relevant to note that the main (only?) feature of 6.22 was drvspace after dblspace and stacker issues of 6.0. Managing storage was an incredibly important part of the OS at that point while nowadays “you never run out of space”
https://goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/IMG_0065.jpg
Since Vista a Windows 10 64 bit installation image has been roughly 4 GB that expands to about 8 GB when extracted. This amount hasn’t significantly changed in the last 10 years while harddisks have increased from roughly 40 GB to 1 TB (or from 8 GB caching SSD to 256 for a basic SSD) at this moment. 32 GB isn’t small, it is tiny
Again, the big change came with Vista 10 years ago. Windows Side-by-Side (WinSxS) fixed DLL-Hell at the expense of storage and the entire “installation-CD” got installed by default so you didn’t get a “insert Windows CD” when you added a component. Hibernation files also grew greatly because of RAM-increases and off course the rollback folders for Windows Updates got big.
With recent Windows 10 releases it is now actually much easier to find out what your storage is being used for. Previously you had no tooling in Windows for this and needed tools (like treesize). Now you can get a nice overview from Windows itself: Settings, System, Storage, Click on Disk C:
There are also much better controls for cleaning up the system. cleanmgr.exe has had many great additions and there is a nice version of it included in the new settings that suits normal users. Updates and Upgrades are more regular and cumulative and require less space, OneDrive (filesync) has much better support for online/offline files, etc
This change in Windows is just a matter of modernizing system updates. I personally* don’t like that they use a system partition for this that reserves the space, but for the normal consumer that is a solution that makes sense and that they will never notice
* I am one of those people that used to have a whole bunch of partitions for different tools and operating systems. Now all my “shared” data is in the cloud and all my operating systems are in virtuals.
Techies. As usual, you miss the point. It’s not the informed person this screws, but the consumer who didn’t know better and bought that cheap Windows tablet. They’re getting screwed, not you, and certainly not the OEMs who foisted this garbage all over store shelves. The OEMs get to laugh all the way to the bank, the techies get to laugh at the “stupid” consumer, and the rest of the people in this situation are fscked and get to be laughed at. Reminds me strongly of Vista or, more recently, Windows Phone.
Linux is not an OS. The fact that a significant number of operating systems based on Linux require more disk space nowadays has no relation to their use of Linux or Linux itself either.