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Although Windows has had awareness of the NVMe storage media protocol since Windows 8.1, it turns out that the stock Microsoft driver for NVMe devices, disk.sys, offers suboptimal performance. This driver dates back to 2006, and is part of Microsoft’s oldest internal basic drivers. Disk.sys appears to treat NVMe devices like SCSI drives. Microsoft released a new native driver with a greater degree of awareness of NVMe with Windows 11 25H2 (client) and Windows 2025 (server) operating systems, called nvmedisk.sys. The easiest way to check if your drive is using the older driver would be to bring up Device Manager, collapse “Disk Drives,” open the Properties of your drive, go to the Driver tab, and click on the “driver details” button.

Notebookcheck made a fascinating discovery that has the potential to unlock greater performance with your NVMe drives, if they are compatible. Apparently, nvmedisk.sys significantly improves performance, both in sequential and random workloads. Using this driver, however, is fraught with risks. Not all NVMe SSDs support it, and if incompatible, it could break Windows 11 boot. The publication put out a guide on how to get Windows 11 to use nvmedisk.sys. This involves changing three Windows Registry values. It would be a good idea to image or backup your data before you tinker with this, so you can perform a full image restore if it breaks Windows booting. The guide can be found in the source links below, use it at your own risk.

  • SavageCoconut@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    9 hours ago

    Here’s a reply from an ―allegedly― ex-employee at Msft you can find in the comment section of the article:

    There is a lot of confusion on this thread between NVMe Storage Controller drivers and Disk drivers, e.g. “we have always been able to replace NVMe drivers”. Previous driver releases, e.g. by Samsung, are for the NVMe Storage Controller, which you don’t see in Device Manager unless you view by connection. The inbox driver is “Standard NVM Express Controller” or stornvme.sys. Samsung’s driver was secnvme.sys.

    The title of this TPU story is misleading; there is no new NVMe (controller) driver, there is a new disk layer driver nvmedisk.sys that is just an optimization of disk.sys that provides marginally better performance for NVMe drives (some SCSI command translations removed; multiple queues supported; presumably latency optimization and cache flush behavior). This is not really an “NVMe driver” because it’s not the controller driver. The disk layer driver is not super specific to a particular storage medium; this is just optimization to pair better with stornvme. It’s possible that you could force install nvmedisk.sys on HDD and it may even work, albeit unreliably and/or slowly.

    Source: I worked at MS for decades. You know that checkbox in Device Manager for drives that says “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device”? That was me.