Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies.
Windows 11 seems to be full of secret features that most people never touch, even after spending years on the platform. Dev Drive seems to be one of those well-kept secrets. Originally, Microsoft intended it for developers, and for the most part, it has stayed in that lane. It's a volume where source code repositories, package caches, build outputs and the other usual stuff a developer would want to keep can be on a fast, low-overhead drive.
The Dev Drive also brings a couple of changes to how Windows handles the files underneath, which I thought would have some interesting implications for games, especially since a Steam library comprises thousands of small files that are read on every launch. That's why I decided to migrate my library to one, just to see if it would make them any faster.
What is Dev Drive on Windows 11?
And what is it for?
If you go through the official Microsoft Learn article on Dev Drives, you'll find that Microsoft says that they build on the Resilient File System (ReFS) to "employ targeted file system optimizations" and provide further control over your storage volume settings and security, trust designation, antivirus configuration and admin control over the filters.
Now, that's a lot of information with vague language, and not to mention, probably not very useful for anyone besides those who are already somewhat familiar with what it seeks to achieve.
Dev Drive is essentially a storage volume that you can create in Windows 11, built on a newer file system called ReFS rather than the old NTFS that your C: drive and most of your other drives use by default. It's not a feature that you can toggle on or off, but it can be set on your existing drive, whether it's a partition, a full disk, or a virtual hard disk.
The reason why it exists is that developer workloads are known to thrash a drive. A single build can spit out potentially thousands of small files, and package managers can pull tens of thousands more from their caches, which the file system has to keep track of. Dev Drive is for those specialized workloads, with a slightly different approach to how Windows scans and monitors the files that are on it.
Now, there are two main reasons why a Dev Drive is more performant. On a Dev Drive that's marked as trusted, Microsoft Defender switches to what it calls "performance mode" and scans files asynchronously in the background, instead of pausing for every file open to check it first. Fewer filters sit in the I/O path by default as well, which translates to less overhead on every read and write.
I moved my Steam library onto a Dev Drive
Here's what it did for my games
When my Dev Drive was mounted, I decided to put my Steam library on it to see if this kind of workload would see any sort of benefit. Steam makes this remarkably easy, since you can just go into the in-app settings, go to storage, and add the Dev Drive as the new library location. For this test, I decided to run a comparison of how quickly Backrooms: Escape Together loads.
To see any marked uplifts, though, it was important that I both downloaded and installed the game on the Dev Drive, which is what I ended up doing. This ensures the shader cache and other dependencies are on the ReFS drive, too.
The first thing I noticed as the game launched was shader compilation. On the very first launch, it took under two minutes. Every subsequent launch that came after, on the other hand, took less than a second. For context, on the NTFS install on the very same PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD, even subsequent launches have the shader compilation screen persist long enough for me to grab a screenshot of them, whereas on the Dev Drive, I couldn't catch it in time, especially after trying at least thrice.
Game and level loading was almost instantaneous as well, which was pleasantly surprising. Since textures, shaders, and configuration files are constantly being pulled in and swapped out, assets stream in as you move through a level, which makes the difference between the two less surprising.
You can set up a Dev Drive on any drive
It can act as a single, fast partition on just about any disk you own
A Dev Drive is quite easy to set up on any drive that you own, but there's still just a couple of things you'd want to keep in mind. The first is that Microsoft only lets you create a Dev Drive on an internal disk. Removable media like a USB stick or an external SSD aren't supported.
The next is a security consideration. A Dev Drive is marked as trusted by default, which is what lets Microsoft Defender run in performance mode on it, so you'll want to ideally do your own due diligence on what goes on it.
To set it up, the first thing I did was go into Settings > System > Storage > Advanced storage settings > Disk & volumes, and then clicked on Create Dev Drive, and then picked Create new VHD.
Then, I named it, set the location to C:, picked 50GB (since my Steam library only needs as much on my laptop), and went with VHDX plus Dynamically expanding (which Microsoft recommends).
Now, going back in Disks & volumes, the new VHD showed up as unallocated space. I clicked on Create Dev Drive option again and picked the unallocated space from the list.
On the format step, I set a label, picked a drive letter, left the size and allocation at their defaults, and clicked on Format. The drive then showed up on File Explorer, formatted as ReFS and tagged as a Dev Drive.
A Windows performance tweak worth trying
Microsoft built the Dev Drive exclusively for developers, but there's nothing stopping you from borrowing it to accelerate your other workloads if they can benefit from it. If you've got 50GB to spare on an internal disk, it's a zero-cost, low-effort way for you to potentially boost your games, and it's quite easy to try it out.