Update Dec 5 2012: Lenovo has released an official hotfix that adjusts the partitions and restores most of the previously unusable disk space. Details here.
How can PC makers screw up perfectly good PC designs? Their bag of tricks is seemingly endless, from cutting costs by specifying inferior hardware to loading new PCs with performance-sapping crapware.
But there's another stupid OEM trick you might not have run into: the incredible shrinking hard disk.
I stumbled across an example earlier this month when I read Walt Mossberg’s review of the new Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13. Mossberg praised Lenovo for the innovative design of this hybrid notebook, which can fold into seemingly impossible positions (thus the name) to work as a tablet or as a touch-first display with the keyboard portion acting as a stand, or in Tent Mode, as shown here.
It’s a clever design, if a bit odd and perhaps impractical. But this is the part of the review that jumped out at me:
You won’t be able to store much data on the Yoga, however. It is only available with a 128 gigabyte solid-state drive, and, shockingly, only 60 gigabytes of that is available to the user — the rest is occupied by system files.
At first I thought that had to be a typo. I’ve installed Windows 8 on dozens of PCs and I’ve seen Windows 8 installed on other manufacturers’ products gobbling far less disk space.
Yesterday, I stopped in at my local Best Buy (where Mossberg picked up his review unit) to investigate. I found a demo unit in a prominent location, opened the Disk Management console, and stared in disbelief at this display, which I captured in all its blurry detail using my phone's camera:
That picture is, I am sure, too fuzzy to view properly, so let me decode it.
First of all, the 128GB SSD is chopped into seven separate partitions. That's three more partitions than I found on a brand-new ASUS notebook I purchased from the Microsoft Store recently. (And the ASUS has a 500GB hard drive, so space isn’t at nearly as much of a premium as it is on the Lenovo.)
Here's what each of those partitions contains:
Now, an experienced Windows user could copy the driver files from drive D: to another location, then delete the D: partition and possibly the mysterious 8 GB unlabeled partition right after it. After turning those into free space, it would be possible to extend the system drive so that it contains nearly 97 GB of space, with 75 GB free for user data.
I can accept the need for those big recovery partitions. They make all sorts of useful repair scenarios possible, even easy, on modern PCs.
But no one should have to do that kind of under-the-hood tinkering on a brand-new PC just to get access to usable disk storage.
Lenovo, what were you thinking when you put together this customer-hostile partition layout? And why isn't anyone filing a lawsuit over this?
Update: Oh look! Someone posted detailed instructions on the Lenovo forum for restoring sanity to this wacky disk configuration. The end result is reportedly a system drive that is 112 GB in size. I haven't tried this myself, so proceed with caution (and a good backup).