Microsoft’s operating systems have so far lacked native support for the NVMe protocol, which has been used by modern SSDs designed for the PCI Express interface for about ten years. Windows therefore translates to the old SCSI standard, which limits capabilities and performance. But Microsoft already has a solution.
For Windows Server 2025, an optional feature update that activates native NVMe support is available from October. The company is not yet talking about availability for consumer versions of Windows 11. Germany’s ComputerBase spotted one fan mod that will deliver the new driver to Elevens, but it can cause problems with bad disk detection, and in the worst case it can break the system completely.
But theoretically there is something to look forward to. SCSI supports one queue with 32 commands, NVMe can handle up to 64 thousand queues, each with 64 thousand commands. It no longer uses a locking mechanism, which will reduce latency. System overhead will also be lower, so I/O operations will not be as dependent on the processor.
Microsoft tested the new driver on a dual-processor system from Intel with 208 threads, 128 GB of RAM and a Solidigm SB5PH27X038T SSD for PCIe 5.0. Windows Server 2025 compared to Server 2022 in the internal benchmark DiskSpd.exe reduced the CPU load by 45% and increased the IOPS value by 80%, specifically when reading 4kB blocks randomly. The older system achieved 1.8 million IOPS, the new one achieved 3.3 million.
In practice, higher performance should be noticeable for database applications, running virtual machines, demanding file operations (backups and restores) or machine learning. In ordinary computers, the benefits will probably be lower or even imperceptible, which is why Microsoft is in no hurry to integrate it into Windows 11.
Even there, however, it could have significance over time. The new system could mitigate the effects of swapping when a computer runs out of RAM. Combined with the Direct Storage interface, fast SSDs could finally get a bigger performance advantage over SATA etc. in games.