Windows Dev Drive setup
Learn how to use Dev Drive to optimize your development experience on Windows 11
Dev Drive is a new Windows addition currently available in Windows Insiders Dev channels. Dev Drive utilizes the ReFS filesystem to optimize developers experience
Setting up Dev Drive
To access Dev Drive, currently, you will need Windows 11 Insider Dev channel build, which you can opt-in here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsinsider/getting-started
After installing Dev channel build, you can follow these steps to create your Dev Drive: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/#set-up-options
Personally, I chose the VHDX approach, as it is the easiest way to test new features without any hustle of allocating any disk volumes.
Package tools cache
Windows Dev Drive can be used to store package cache and speed up your dependencies installation time.
Rust and Cargo
setx /M CARGO_HOME E:\Packages\.cargo
You also will need to modify your environment variables manually by changing one your %PATH% variable entries from C:\Users\<user>\.cargo\bin to %CARGO_HOME%\bin
After these changes, you can manually move your previous .cargo to the new location.
Yarn
yarn cache clean
yarn config set cache-folder E:\Packages\Yarn\Cache
NPM
npm config set cache E:\Packages\npm-cache --global
Don't forget to delete the old cache directory %LocalAppData%\npm-cache
Python Pip
setx /M PIP_CACHE_DIR E:\Packages\pip
Don't forget to delete the old cache directory %LocalAppData%\pip\Cache
PlatformIO
setx /M PLATFORMIO_CORE_DIR E:\Packages\.platformio
After running this command, you will need to delete the old installation (presumably, C:\Users\<user>\.platformio) and install PlatformIO once again.
You also will need to modify your %PATH% variable by adding %PLATFORMIO_CORE_DIR%\penv\Scripts entry.
Nuget package cache
setx /M NUGET_PACKAGES E:\Packages\.nuget\packages
vcpkg cache
setx /M VCPKG_DEFAULT_BINARY_CACHE E:\Packages\vcpkg