Group Policy Preferences Drive Map Survey and Feedback
Heya folks, Ned here again. I just published a survey for IT Pros on Group Policy Preferences Drive Map. It's just a few minutes of your time, totally anonymous (unless you want to talk more) and could help make your life easier someday ... continue reading
Offline Files survey and feedback
Heya folks, Ned here again. I just published a survey for IT Pros on Offline Files (aka "Client-side Caching", aka "CSC"). It's just 5 minutes of your time, totally anonymous, and should help us make your life easier someday. Your feedback is invaluable ... continue reading
SMB insecure guest auth now off by default in Windows Insider Pro editions
Heya folks, Ned here again. Starting in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 25276, the Pro editions of Windows now disable SMB insecure guest authentication fallbacks by default. Guest logons don't require passwords & don't support standard security features like signing and encryption. Allowing ... continue reading
Slower SMB Read Performance for large files in 22H2
Heya folks, Ned here again. There is a performance regression in 22H2 when copying larger files from a remote computer down to a Windows 11 computer. A large (multi-GB file) might see as much as 40% less throughput over SMB when copying down ... continue reading

SMB authentication rate limiter now on by default in Windows Insider
Heya folks, Ned here again. Back in the spring of 2022 we released a new SMB preview feature: the SMB authentication rate limiter. It is available in Windows 11 Insider and Windows Server Insider builds. IT staff often enable access to the SMB server service ... continue reading

SMB compression behavior & settings changes
Heya folks, Ned here again. As you know from a previous post, we released an end-to-end SMB compression capability with Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. You can learn all about it at SMB Compression | Microsoft Docs. There was ... continue reading
The mystery of the slow file copy from the fast computer
Heya folks, Ned here again. A customer contacted us about a strange behavior they were seeing when copying large files to a Windows Server 2019 cluster using SMB 3.1.1. Around every 5GB transferred, the copy would temporarily pause for a few seconds, then ... continue reading
SMB over QUIC is GA and we have lots of news!
Heya folks, Ned here again. As you might have heard now in all the MS Ignite hullabaloo, Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition is now generally available and that means that SMB over QUIC is now generally available too! I ... continue reading
SDDC extension update in Windows Admin Center
Create thinly provisioned volumes in Windows Admin Center Thin provisioning is a standout feature exclusive to Azure Stack HCI 21H2 and offers flexible capacity management. With thin provisioning, storage is allocated when needed and volumes can be over-provisioned (size larger ... continue reading
Windows Server 2022 is full of new file services!
Heya folks, Ned here again. As you’ve heard by now, Windows Server 2022 is available and supported for production deployments. This new OS brings many new features around security, storage, networking, web, containers, applications, virtualization, edge, and Azure hybrid. Today ... continue reading