TECH NEWS – Although this driver is not officially available for this Microsoft operating system, some users have managed to enable it with impressive results.
It is striking how traditional Windows operating systems such as Windows 10 and Windows 11 continue to limit the performance of NVMe SSDs, despite these drives having dominated the market for years. Consumer versions of Windows rely on a SCSI emulation layer to communicate with NVMe storage devices. While this ensures compatibility, it also increases CPU load and latency, resulting in slightly lower performance than the hardware is capable of delivering.
After a long wait, Microsoft finally released a “native” NVMe driver, but it was designed exclusively for Windows Server 2025. As a result, the driver remains unavailable to average consumers. Nevertheless, some users have successfully enabled the driver on Windows 11, and the results show a clear and measurable improvement. One Twitter user reported an average increase of around 9 to 19% in read and write speeds in the AS SSD benchmark.
The impact is especially evident in random read and write performance, which translates into tangible benefits in everyday use. While sequential read and write speeds saw only modest gains, the 4K and 4K-64Thrd benchmarks revealed a dramatic difference compared to SCSI-based solutions. A Reddit user ran benchmarks on an MSI Claw 8 AI+ handheld PC equipped with an NVMe SSD, and CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 results showed improvements of approximately 4-11%, and in some cases as much as 7-85%, in random read and write performance.
While a performance jump approaching 85% is undeniably impressive, enabling the driver itself is far from risk-free. Users have reported various issues, including cases where drives became inaccessible altogether. For this reason, experimenting with the driver is not recommended for most users. Still, it is disappointing that NVMe SSDs, despite being on the market for several years, are still unable to reach their full potential. For Microsoft, accelerating the rollout of native NVMe drivers to mainstream Windows versions would be a logical and much-needed step.
Forrás: WCCFTech
