Performance Testing a DevDrive on Windows 11 LIVE and RAW with ZERO EDITS 

I love how youtube cut to a commercial for painkillers just as you made your paranoid face and pressed the button to do diskstuff! 😅😅😅 Thanks for a great video by the way!

This is perfect timing! I just got a second drive for my dev machine and had intended on just storing code and my swap file but now I'll be using at least a decent chunk of it for a dev drive. We've got some projects that take several minutes to build so I'm hoping this will make a pretty big difference.

When you tried the last time on C-drive, your nuget cache was on the D: drive, so you got some benefits from that too.

Very interesting video Scott. Anyone know if other AV software will support DevDrives?

I'm glad that they are working to help dev productivity in terms of filesystem improvements. Unfortunately FS performance on a mounted dev drive still sucks :( It would be REALLY nice to be able to efficiently share a directory between Windows and WSL2. Do you (Scott, or anyone else for that matter) have any recommendations for improving performance in this scenario? I feel like devs with Windows machines toggling back and forth between WSL and native Windows has to be pretty common. Many dev tools just don't work well (or not at all) for windows, especially when working with containers, K8s, etc.

Doing "disk stuff" always makes me uneasy. Measure twice, cut once sort of a thing!

any plans to have that feature on (build) servers? Many corporate Windows servers also suffer from AV filters and slow disk IO...

Seems to me that the biggest part is the AntiVirus integration. As you state at the end, by moving your package caches (nuget, npm, ruby, composer, etc.) on to the Dev Drive as well then clones and restores should improve massively. Now i just need corporate IT to start rolling out Windows 11 and ensure their preferred AV supports trusted drives ;)

4:53 right there if you kept reading down, it says you've got 2 drives with unallocated space. Didn't even need to go into disk manager to see that. (though, yes, DM helped you determine which disk 0 and disk 1 were)

Do you use external antivirus? I can find the Dev Drive protection option.

Hey Scott! Have you tested the same thing bu with DevDrive created as a Virtual Container instead of a new partition? Are there any differences in performance between those two options? Thanks!

RE: using DevDrives for TEMP folders (at 21:40), I don't know that this would be a good idea given that there's trust concerns when using DevDrives. Package caches make a lot of sense since there is some degree of trust regarding which packages you're using (hopefully) but TEMP can be used by any program.

What about comparing windows with an excluded folder from antivirus compared to the dev drive with the exclusion?

Just 2 suggestions I would add. The option to resize an existing volume on Windows 11 is bugged. It says 50 GB is the minimum for Dev drives, yet the only option you have on the setting's screen is the total free space on your drive. Be aware that if you do this on your main C: drive, you are now left with 0 free space left 😡 This is seriously a bug because if you go to the old Disk Management tools on Windows you can just shrink your existing drive to the desired size, example 50 GB (if that is your flavor...). Then go back to the options and you can pick the new unallocated space. Use the old Disk Partition tools and not the Win11 Dev drive wizard. Second suggestion. Do not forget to enable BitLocker on that new dev drive, by default it will not be encrypted. Great video!

interesting information. Any suggestions with HDD and standard hardware?

I kept waiting for that "wow!" moment... for 28 minutes... Appreciate the effort though. :)

You should set up keyboard shortcuts to jump from one command output to the next to find previous results faster. And run your divisions from the PS prompt instead of using Calc 😜. I second another guy's comment that one provably shouldn't put the system-wide Temp on the Dev Drive; I'd probably go for a local override in the shell. About using unpartitioned space: beware that this eats up the space set aside by SSD overprovisioning so theoretically affects your SSD's lifespan. The PowerToys Environment Variable editor now *has* been released 😛.

You say “only matters if disk limited” (paraphrased) but my understanding is that the point of Dev Drive is to address cpu bottlenecks caused by all the filters to talk to the disk.

I have a question, DevDrive vs WSL2, which one is better? Can you have your wsl inside DevDrive? If they working already on wsl why making a dev drive?

if I run a malicious repo on a dev drive that will spawn a process with a nodejs, will the dev drive save me from sending all the private stuff I have in .env files for example? What's the difference security-wise comparing to the usual NFT folder? Thank you

I develop on a VM (win 11 guest) running in my Win 11 host. Can I make a devdrive VHD on host and mount it to guest?

Hi Scott, After every update the DEV DRIVE disappears.

Did you get a chance to test out HDD? ie HDD NTFS vs HDD REFS. I've a smaller SSD for OS and a bigger (cheaper) HDD for storage.

I get a 'Unable to format volume. Error: Cannot perform the requested operation when the drive is read-only (8)' when I try to create a dev drive with some unallocated space. No idea why, the drive isn't read only and doesn't show up as such in disk management. Anyone any ideas?

Hey Scott, I noticed your terminal window opens nice a quick. Since I set up Ohmyposh similar to you, it takes 2-5 seconds to load my profile. Any idea how to debug it?

You not being LinusTechTips is a good thing. 🤣🤣🤣

What is this zooming/arrow-ing/border-ing program you use (1:44)? Can I download it from somewhere?

afaict you don't need to enable "developer mode" to use DevDrives. Developer mode is needed to develop native Windows apps.

My version of windows 11 is 22621.2428. I have developer mode on and full unallocated disk. I see "Create dev drive" option in windows, but have no way of actually creating a dev drive. Am I missing something?

Do you know why creating a dev drive is greyed out in Windows on Arm64 (Windows Dev Kit 2023)?

Would the Pagefile on dev drive be a good thing?

What shell are you using in ps ?

What is it about dev drives that limits their use on dev directories? Why not use them everywhere?

Seems like the biggest improvement came from AntiVirus settings...

I was watching on the wrong numbers 😂😂😂

17:15 Technical terms... 😂

Performance Testing a DevDrive on Windows 11 using FACTS and LOGIC

Be warned, I tried this and during the creation of the dev drive my machine blue screened of death. I'm not sure of the SSD model but it's a fairly recent 2Tb Kingston. Looking into DISKPART in recovery mode, it appears my entire C partition is gone. Work lost, hours wasted. My fault I guess 😞