📢 Windows 10 build 20226 adds storage health monitoring feature, and more

Microsoft released a new Windows 10 Preview Build to the Windows Insiders in the Dev channel. The new build 20226 comes from the rs_prerelease branch, which is where the new features show up first. With this build, Microsoft is rolling out multiple improvements to Windows 10, including one new feature to the Storage settings page.

The new feature adds a storage health monitoring system, that has been designed to detect hardware abnormalities and protect your data. To know more about this feature, and other changes, continue reading further.

Microsoft is working on a new feature for Windows 10, that will detect hardware abnormalities for NVMe SSDs and notify users before drive failure. This is being developed to protect user data, as attempting to recover data after drive failure is both frustrating and expensive.

Microsoft recommends users to immediately take the backup of the data once they receive the first notification about any possible drive failure.

Clicking on the notification or navigating to the drive properties page in Storage Settings (Settings -> System -> Storage -> Manage disks and volumes -> Properties) will provide additional details about the device.

This will display the estimated remaining life of your storage device. This is based on the manufacturer's prediction of drive life. The page will also display the temperature of the storage device, that is running on your system.

Other updates for the insiders

Microsoft also rolled out a new user experience for managing your linked devices with the "Your Phone" app. With this new settings page, you can now link a new device, remove an old device, and switch between active devices all easily within the app.

"This new user experience will be gradually rolling out to Insiders, so it may take some time to show up in the Your Phone app", Microsoft said. That means you may not see it immediately on your system even though you are running the latest insider's dev build.

Microsoft also started 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.

Along with this build, Microsoft also adds the ability for Notepad windows to persist update and restarts (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.

File Explorer is also being updated, 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.

The new DNS options in Settings is also being updated to make a static DNS entry required when entering a static IP and to make gateway, not a required field.