Windows: Microsoft wants to massively improve SSD performance

High-end SSDs with PCI Express connectivity are set to become significantly faster under Windows, while Microsoft promises a substantial reduction in processor load. The reason is a long-overdue modernization of how Microsoft's operating systems handle read and write commands to storage devices. Until now, Windows has apparently only supported the widely used Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol to a limited extent. NVMe is based on the physical PCI Express interface, which most modern SSDs for M.2 slots use.

Although Microsoft has a hardware-independent NVMe driver, Windows has been translating NVMe commands into Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) until now. Microsoft writes about this in a blog post. SCSI originally emerged in the 80s and was not a major bottleneck even during the SATA era. It was only the massive parallelization of accesses to PCIe SSDs that left SCSI behind.

Server version leads the way

Windows Server 2025 is Microsoft's first operating system to receive native NVMe support. In the current version, interested parties can activate the change via a PowerShell command in the registry:

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 1176759950 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

After a successful change and a restart, NVMe SSDs will no longer appear under Drives in Device Manager but under Storage Disks (or a translation).

In terms of performance, PCIe 5.0 SSDs are expected to benefit the most. Microsoft shows a benchmark where Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) increase from about 1.8 million to 3.3 million.

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Microsoft-Benchmarks zur nativen NVMe-Unterstützung in Windows Server 2025 (2 Bilder)

Efficiency increase

However, systems with less speedy PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 3.0 SSDs could become more efficient, as a native NVMe stack also relieves the processor. It spends less time serializing and processing access commands.

Microsoft writes about this: “Basic performance tests with DiskSpd.exe show that WS2025 systems with native NVMe enabled can deliver up to ~80% more IOPS and ~45% saved CPU clock cycles per I/O compared to WS2022 for random 4KB reads on NTFS file systems.”

In the blog post, Microsoft calls the update a “cornerstone for modernizing our storage stack.” Once it proves itself, Microsoft could also incorporate it into Windows 11.

NVMe 1.0 is now 14 years old. The first consumer SSDs with it appeared in 2015. The protocol has since become indispensable for desktop PCs and notebooks.

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