From conda-forge/conda-forge.github.io#2323 (comment):

If you want to experiment with https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-dev-drive as well, you may be able to get even more speed increase (that's not my action, I don't think I actually know the creator of it, but I did help with the underlying functionality, and the action's implementation looks reasonable at a quick glance).

Basically, the Windows OS drive does a lot of processing on every file access that any other drive will (probably) not do, and a Dev Drive is even more optimised for this kind of use. Hopefully, one day Actions will use a Dev Drive by default, but I don't think they've enabled that yet.

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It needs a recent enough Windows version, that's all. I don't know the exact build number (probably around 10.0.26000). Even without it, that action will give you a similar speed up.

uv is using their own script, which will be more portable than the Action. Again, they're falling back to a VHDX for now, but it only needs a -DevDrive added to the Format-Volume command for the extra boost (it'll fail if it's not available, so it could be handled with an error handler, but I guess they decided not to do that for one reason or another).

So I think we can add a conda-forge.yml option that creates a Dev Drive on E: using that command from the uv script. Then we can pair that with the MINIFORGE_HOME and CONDA_BLD_PATH redefinitions we already using for D: in #2076.