Microsoft’s Defender Antivirus Gets “Performance Mode” for Dev Units – TechWar.GR

Microsoft introduced a new Microsoft Defender feature called “performance mode” for developers in Windows 11, designed to reduce the impact of antivirus scans when analyzing files stored on Dev drives.

Introduced at this year’s Microsoft Design conference, Dev Drive is a new type of drive for Windows 11 that uses the Resilient File System (ReFS) available in public preview and offers developers improved performance and resilience against data corruption.

This developer-oriented storage volume is designed to store large data sets such as source code repositories, output or intermediate files, and package repositories (eg Npm, Nuget).

As Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer for Windows and Devices Panos Panai said, the combination of Dev Drive and Defender can result in an increase in build speed of up to 30%.

“Dev Drive is based on File System Resilience, which, together with the new performance mode feature in Microsoft Defender for Antivirus, provides up to 30% improvement in file system creation times for file I/O scenarios,” Panay . he said.

“The new way of working is safer for your workload than folder or process exceptions, providing a complete solution to balance security and performance.”

When this new Defender Antivirus feature is enabled, it will balance performance and threat protection by delaying the scan until the file operation is complete.

To set up a new developer drive, you need to click the “Create Developer Drive” button after going to System > Drive > Advanced store settings > Disks and volumes in the Windows Settings app.

The operating mode will be enabled by default for “Trusted” drives, which applies to all new developer drives, and will only be available if real-time protection is enabled.

It is also ONLY available for developer drives and cannot be volume-booted using other file systems such as FAT32 or NTFS.

“Driver Storage is automatically set to trusted, providing the best performance by default. A trusted Dev Drive means that a developer using audio has a high level of confidence in the security of the content stored there,” Microsoft he explains.

However, any Dev modules transferred from another device will be set as untrusted and will use the original Microsoft Defender protection mode instead of the new performance mode.

However, it is possible set the developer drive as trusted use the FSUTIL command line utility, which will automatically enable the new operating mode.

Dev Units are currently only available to Local Users in the Windows 11 Developer Center and require at least 8GB of RAM and at least 50GB of free disk space.

The functionality also requires Microsoft Defender Antivirus, Microsoft Defender for Business, or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Plan 1 or Plan 2 with Antimalware version 4.18.2303.8 (or later) and Antimalware signature version 1.385.1455.0 (or later).