I've found this to be a large problem for locally hosting video files as well. Duplicating tens of gigabytes of video on the same relatively small SSD isn't really feasible. I'm not at the stage of development where I'm looking for a dedicated external host for these binaries either, so being able to bypass the copy on serve would be useful.

For my own purposes I've put together something that creates junctions on Windows (which bypasses permission issues), and symbolic links on Linux for specified folders. I'll submit my changes as a PR, but as I'm not up to speed on writing tests or completely familiar with the MKDocs structure, consider it as a way to continue the discussion.

You can check this implementation if it works well.

• Don't physically copy static files for mkdocs serve #3570

No idea when this feature will be released but here it is

Can confirm this is working on Windows 10, thanks! This will meaningfully make a difference to my workflow.

The icing on the cake would be to be able to define other asset directories external to docs_dir that can be referenced by the web server. The use case: this lets me store my video library on a separate large disk drive or NAS, but keep my development on a smaller local SSD. Not 100% necessary as I can always symlink a drive folder or UNC path into the docs_dir, but certainly a nice-to-have.