How to enable or disable Reserved Storage on Windows 10

Microsoft has been working to improve how it delivers updates. So far, its in-place Windows 10 updates have not been working that well. Users often run into problems and the oddest of bugs. When you do an in-place update, Windows 10 downloads files to your system which require some space however, in order to install the update, it also needs some extra space to complete the update.

Your PC must have some free space in order to update Windows 10. That number has always been somewhat vague but 10GB is often considered sufficient however, Microsoft has added a new feature in Windows 1903 called Reserved Storage. This is a bit of space that is reserved on your system for updates. During an update, that space will be utilized to prevent problems (though some might still occur). Here’s how you can enable or disable Reserved Space on Windows 10.

Enable or disable Reserved Storage

Reserved Storage should be enabled by default if you do a clean install of Windows 10 1903 however, you can still enable it if it isn’t. You will have to do this by editing the registry so you will need admin rights.

Tap the Win+R keyboard shortcut to open the Run box and type ‘regedit’.

In the registry editor, go to the following location;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ReserveManager

Right-click the ShippedWithReserves value and set it to 1 to enable it. To disable it, set it to 0.

Restart your system. Restarting it won’t reserve the space right away. You will have to wait for another update.

The reserved space should show up in the Settings app. Go to the System group of settings and select the Storage tab. The Reserved Storage appears under System & Reserved.

Should you disable it?

Reserved Storage is there to make updates much smoother. It might seem unnecessary but all devices need some free space to update their firmware. Windows has, for the greater part of its life, run on hard drives and they’re fairly large but now, they’re often installed on SSDs of a smaller capacity or they run on tablets both of which don’t have a a lot of free space. That’s why users often have problems with updates.

The amount of reserved storage may not be the same for all devices and it will not include the space the Windows.old folder will take up. That folder alone can be larger than 20GB but not having the space for it won’t result in the update failing. It doesn’t count towards the space that’s needed to update Windows 10.