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Mounting Google Drive as a Real Local Drive on Windows (Without Losing Your Mind)

#software #tools #tutorial

Google Drive's official "Backup and Sync" client is fine for keeping one folder synced. But the moment you want to treat Google Drive like a real disk — open files in Photoshop, run git on it, point a build tool at it — the sync client breaks down.

This post is a 2026 walkthrough of every reasonable way to mount Google Drive as a local drive on Windows, with my honest recommendation.

The 4 real options

Tool What it does Speed (read) Cost
Google Drive for desktop Sync client N/A (sync model) Free / 100 GB+ paid
rclone mount FUSE-style mount via WinFsp 60 MB/s Free
RaiDrive Pro Native kernel mount 80 MB/s $69.99/yr
ScsDriver Native kernel mount 75 MB/s $9.99/yr

(The "speed" numbers assume you're paying for Google One so the daily API quota isn't an issue.)

Google Drive for desktop (sync model)

The default. Choose what to sync, it downloads.

  • ✅ Pro: Real files on disk
  • ❌ Con: Eats 800 GB to 2 TB+ for a 500 GB Drive
  • ❌ Con: Sync conflicts (same file edited on two devices)
  • ❌ Con: Sync errors stop silently

If your drive is small (< 50 GB) and your disk is large, this is fine.

rclone mount via WinFsp

rclone mount gdrive: /mnt/gdrive --vfs-cache-mode writes from WSL or PowerShell with WinFsp.

  • ✅ Pro: Free, open source, configurable
  • ✅ Pro: Caching mode is your choice (off, minimal, writes, full)
  • ❌ Con: Slower (FUSE round-trips through WinFsp)
  • ❌ Con: First time setup is fiddly (OAuth dance, rclone config, WinFsp install)
  • ❌ Con: Not all Windows apps handle FUSE-mounted drives gracefully

For Linux users, this is the obvious choice. For Windows users who don't already have rclone configured, the setup is annoying.

RaiDrive Pro

GUI-driven. Click "Add" → Google Drive → OAuth → mount. Done.

  • ✅ Pro: Clean UI, fast
  • ✅ Pro: Lots of cloud presets (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, S3, etc.)
  • ❌ Con: $69.99/yr — expensive if you only need Google Drive
  • ❌ Con: Some users report instability on long-running mounts

ScsDriver

Same kernel-level mount as RaiDrive but cheaper and with a smaller feature set.

  • ✅ Pro: $9.99/yr
  • ✅ Pro: Stable (24/7 mount, no drops in my testing)
  • ✅ Pro: Small installer (~10 MB), no telemetry
  • ❌ Con: Less feature-rich (no fancy cloud presets — you give it a WebDAV URL)
  • ❌ Con: No built-in Google Drive OAuth — you need a third-party WebDAV bridge (see below)

The Google Drive + WebDAV bridge problem

Google Drive doesn't natively speak WebDAV. So to mount it via ScsDriver, you need a bridge. Two options:

  1. rclone serve webdav: runs on your machine, exposes your Google Drive as a local WebDAV server, then ScsDriver mounts that.
  2. CloudMounter-style cloud provider bridge (paid).

Or just use RaiDrive, which talks Google Drive's native API directly. No bridge.

What I actually use

For personal Google Drive: RaiDrive Pro.

For self-hosted stuff (Synology NAS, S3 buckets): ScsDriver.

For work, where I have 5 cloud providers to mount: rclone with a custom script.

The split is:

  • If you mount 1-2 clouds and want it to just work → RaiDrive
  • If you mount WebDAV/SFTP/self-hosted → ScsDriver
  • If you mount 5+ different providers and want free → rclone

Reference

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