Microsoft enters ‘final phase’ of disabling SMB1 file sharing in Windows 11

Most preview builds of Windows 11 focus on adding features, but sometimes Microsoft uses them to remove things. Users installing the latest builds of Windows 11 Home Insider will find that support for version 1.0 of the venerable SMB file sharing protocol is now disabled by default, which can break file sharing for older NAS hardware. A post by Microsoft Program Manager Ned Pyle details the reasons for the change and how it will affect users.

Microsoft has already disabled SMB1 by default in other editions of Windows. The SMB1 Server service has been removed from all versions of Windows starting in 2017, and the Client service has been disabled in Windows 10 Pro editions starting in 2018. Lyle writes that the Windows home editions client was the last to arrive as it “would cause consumer pain among people who are still using very old hardware, the group that least understands why their new Windows 11 laptop can’t connect to their old network hard drive.”

SMB1 has long since been superseded by newer and more secure protocol versions; SMB2 was introduced in 2007 and version 3.1.1 was added to Windows 10 in 2016. But the original version is still occasionally used by older servers and hardware, and if a machine is old enough to rely on SMB1, it’s probably old enough that someone is interested in maintaining or updating it.

For now, the SMB1 feature can still be set manually by users and system administrators who need it, and if you’re using SMB1 on a PC you upgrade to Windows 11, the upgrade won’t disable the feature. In the next step of the migration, we’ll go even further by completely removing the DLLs and drivers needed to support SMB1 from the OS. The company will “provide an out-of-band, unsupported installation package for organizations or users who still need SMB1 to connect to legacy factory equipment, medical equipment, consumer NAS, and more,”writes Pyle.

Listing image by Old Windows Icons/Andrew Cunningham