SSD Afterburner: Windows 11 also has Microsoft's new NVMe driver

Microsoft has improved the SSD drivers in Windows Server 2025 with the aim of improving performance. As it turns out, Windows 11 also includes them. And there too, the new software stack provides noticeably better performance.

Following Microsoft's explanation of the new approach to NVMe SSDs, it became clear that the previous drivers represent an unnecessary bottleneck. While Microsoft has a manufacturer-independent driver for the widespread Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol, Windows has so far translated NVMe commands into the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI). SCSI itself, given its advanced age, was surprisingly performant enough for a long time. However, with the massive parallelization of accesses in modern SSD hardware, the software foundation apparently becomes the bottleneck.

Registry changes for SSD turbo

For Windows Server 2025, Microsoft has named a registry key that interested parties must add to activate the new NVMe SSD driver. This is intended to lead to significantly more Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and higher data throughput. At the same time, CPU load can be reduced. However, Windows 11 also includes the new driver. To use it, however, three registry values must be set. Online the hints can be found for the values that differ from Windows Server 2025:

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 735209102 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 1853569164 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 156965516 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

The process can be simplified by creating a text file with the following content, and then renaming the file from .txt to .reg. The values can then be applied by double-clicking and confirming that the changes are intended:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides]
"735209102"=dword:00000001
"1853569164"=dword:00000001
"156965516"=dword:00000001

These changes are not official statements from Microsoft. It is advisable to back up the system beforehand – it is quite possible that unwanted side effects may occur. A restart is required after creating these registry keys.

Activate new driver

In our tests under Windows 11 25H2, the new driver is then active. This can be checked in the Device Manager, which is easily accessible by right-clicking the "Start" icon in Windows.

If the switch was successful, the SSD will no longer appear under "Drives" but under "Storage media".

In the driver details, the entry "nvmedisk.sys" is found.

The driver search currently finds no newer versions for the "NVMe disk".

So far, we have only conducted initial anecdotal tests. No side effects were observed in the first few hours. Access times in synthetic benchmarks decreased, and throughput increased by around 10 to 15 percent for a PCIe 4.0 SSD – however, this was not measured in a clean clinical test environment, but on a "normal" workstation. Further initial quick tests also showed performance gains on systems with PCIe 3.0 SSDs. The systems reach a "quiet state" noticeably faster after a restart.

The driver version under Windows 11 25H2 contains the number 26100. However, this actually indicates Windows 11 24H2. It is quite possible that this Windows 11 build also contains the new driver. We could not verify this in the short time available.

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(dmk)