Microsoft has just announced that Windows Server 2025 will natively support NVMe drives, some 14 years after the technology launched. Given that Windows 11 shares the same architecture as Windows 10, it stands to reason that enterprising users can also enable native NVMe support using the same procedure. Computer Base [machine translated] reports that some users who enabled the feature experienced lower latencies and higher transfer speeds, resulting in an improvement of about 10% to 15%.
This feature will allow users to maximize read and write speeds on their NVMe drives while reducing processor load. It will also limit instances in which one or more applications performing many storage-intensive tasks would cause the entire system to freeze. Despite this, a few users said they didn’t see any change in performance after tweaking their registry.
However, this feature is not without its drawbacks. Given that Windows treats all storage devices as SCSI, most drives and software are tuned for this operation, where NVMe commands are translated into SCSI commands that it can recognize. Because of this, some storage management tools either no longer recognize NVMe drives or detect them twice as two different drives. The registry tweak can also change the disk ID, making it difficult for some apps, such as backup tools, to detect the drive.
Despite that, native NVMe support is still a game-changer for Windows systems. This feature allows the operating system to maximize the performance of DDR5 drives, especially since Microsoft says it supports 64,000 queues, each handling 64,000 commands simultaneously — meaning it can hold over 4 billion operations. On the other hand, the supported SCSI protocols limit each queue to 32 commands.
We expect this technology to be slowly standardized over the years, especially as developers take advantage of native NVMe support. But if you’re one to push your hardware to its limits, you can force the change now by following the instructions from Microsoft. Nevertheless, it’s recommended that you back up your system or test the changes in a virtual environment before making them, as doing so could lead to system instability.
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