Usually, I would not recommend disabling reserved storage on your Windows 11 system. However, there may be times when you urgently need additional storage and cannot think of any files to delete. In such a situation, your first course of action should be to remove unnecessary items that are occupying important space on your Windows 11 system. If that doesn’t help, you can consider uninstalling optional features and unused languages to free up space on your device.

If your storage requirements are still not met, then you should consider disabling the reserved storage feature. To do this, open the Start menu, type Windows PowerShell in the search bar, and select “Run as Administrator.” Then type the following command and press Enter.

Get-WindowsReservedStorageState

If you see the message “Reserved Storage is Enabled,” it means you can disable the reserved storage. To do so, type the following command and press Enter.

Set-WindowsReservedStorageState -State Disabled

Windows will now quickly release the amount of reserved storage on the drive where the operating system is installed. However, you might encounter an error stating, “This operation is not supported when reserved storage is in use.” This means that a Windows update has been downloaded and needs to be installed. So, install the update before disabling reserved storage.

Once your storage needs are met, I highly recommend re-enabling reserved storage. To do this, execute the following command in an elevated Windows PowerShell window.

Set-WindowsReservedStorageState -State Enabled​

This was all about reserved storage, how it functions, and how you can disable it. In essence, reserved storage is an important Windows setting that you can disable to gain a bit of extra free space on your computer. However, you should only take this approach if you are truly in need of additional storage on your device and cannot find any files to delete to create space.