This is a follow-up to our previous coverage of Dev Drive and copy-on-write (CoW) linking. See our previous articles from May 24, 2023, October 13, 2023, and November 2, 2023. Dev Drive was released in Windows 11 in October, 2023, and will be part of Windows Server 2025 this fall. Server 2025 and Windows 11 24H2 ship with an enhancement to automat...

(Updated Apr 4 and 26, 2024 with some release news. Also see the next post) On October 25, 2023, the Windows filesystem team released an early preview of copy-on-write (CoW) linking in the Windows 11 Insider Canary channel. This builds automatic CoW linking into the Win32 APIs when using Dev Drive or ReFS. If released next year, this will elimina...

(Edited Oct 31, 2023 to add info about later patch for InTune, Nov 6 and 8, 2023 to add Win11 23H2 image info, Apr 4, 2024 to add info about Server. Also see the next post and the one after.) In a previous post, Dev Drive and Copy-on-Write for Developer Performance, we published early performance numbers for the new Dev Drive feature of Windows 11...

At Microsoft Build 2023 the Windows team announced Dev Drive, a new evolution of the Windows ReFS filesystem retuned for developer workloads like Git and builds. This new functionality will ship later this year in the Windows 11 23H2 refresh and is available now for early testing via the Windows Insider program.