Microsoft reserved partition created on new SSD, is it safe to delete it?

Question

I recently got a new SSD (Samsung 860 EVO 1TB) and I setup the GPT partition table in Windows 10 and made one partition (NTFS) which is 931.5GiB in size.
Everything looked fine in Windows, there was one single partition on the drive.
When I switched to my linux distro installation and ran lsblk, I got this:

sdc      8:32   0 931,5G  0 disk 
├─sdc1   8:33   0    16M  0 part 
└─sdc2   8:34   0 931,5G  0 part

Windows 10 created a 16MiB Microsoft Reserved Partition before the partition I made, why was it created (I'm using this drive as a data drive, not as an OS drive) and is it safe to remove it and try to recreate the main partition without the 16MiB partition (if I can find a way to do that)?

Answer 1

This question was asked and answered on the Microsoft forums:

The Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR) is only used on the UEFI systems using the GPT disk structure.

It is created to reserve a portion of the disk space for possible subsequent usage by the Windows Operating System. This partition does not contain any meaningful data or any user data. However, it is assigned and ideally used for remapping damaged sectors.

Since modern disks take care themselves of remapping damaged sectors, this part of the answer is either incorrect or is because of some old code that is still today left over in the Windows installer.

The correct answer is most probably : "For some future use". This is because there is no current need for it.

The size of the partition is ridiculously small, so I don't recommend removing it, especially as it is the first partition on the disk and its deletion will change the partition numbering, which can cause some obscure problems.