System Enable or Disable Create Dev Drive in Windows 11

This tutorial will show you how to enable or disable the ability to create a Dev Drive for all users in Windows 11.

Dev Drive is a new form of storage volume available to improve performance for key developer workloads. Dev Drive is built upon Resilient File System (ReFS) technology and includes file system optimizations and features that provide more control over storage volume settings and security, including trust designation, antivirus configuration, and administrative control over what filters are attached. It has been designed to meet a developer’s needs to host project source code, working folders, and package caches. It is not designed for general consumer workloads such as document libraries, installing packaged applications or non-developer tools.

By default, to give the best possible performance, creating a Dev Drive automatically grants trust in the new volume. A trusted Dev Drive volume causes real-time protection to run in a special asynchronous “performance mode” for that volume. Running performance mode provides a balance between threat protection and performance. The balance is achieved by deferring security scans until after the open file operation has completed, instead of performing the security scan synchronously while the file operation is being processed. This mode of performing security scans inherently provides faster performance, but with less protection. However, enabling performance mode provides significantly better protection than other performance tuning methods such as using folder exclusions, which block security scans altogether.

If you like, you can disable the ability to create a dev drive for all users on the device. This will not affect any current dev drives.

Reference:

You must be signed in as an administrator to enable or disable the ability to create a Dev Drive.

EXAMPLE: Create a dev drive enabled and disabled








1 Open Windows Terminal (Admin), and select either Windows PowerShell or Command Prompt.

2 Copy and paste the command below you want to use into Windows Terminal (Admin), and press Enter.




3 You can now close Windows Terminal (Admin) if you like.

The Local Group Policy Editor is only available in the Windows 11 Pro, Enterprise, and Education editions.

All editions can use Option Three to configure the same policy.

1 Open the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc).

2 Navigate to the location below in the left pane of Local Group Policy Editor. (see screenshot below)



3 In the right pane of Filesystem, double click/tap on the Enable dev drive policy to edit it. (see screenshot above)

4 Do step 5 (enable) or step 6 (disable) below for what you want.

This is the default setting.

This will override Option One.

7 You can now close the Local Group Policy Editor if you like.





1 Do step 2 (enable) or step 3 (disable) below for what you want.

This is the default setting.

(Contents of REG file for reference)

This will override Option One.

(Contents of REG file for reference)

4 Save the .reg file to your desktop.

5 Double click/tap on the downloaded .reg file to merge it.

6 When prompted, click/tap on Run, Yes (UAC), Yes, and OK to approve the merge.

7 You can delete the downloaded .reg file if you like.


That's it,
Shawn Brink