Previously, Microsoft launched natively developed NVMe drivers for the Windows Server 2025 server operating system. Previously, the NVMe drivers provided by Microsoft were translated through the old interface protocol, so performance losses were inevitable. This is the main reason why Microsoft wants to develop native drivers.
Windows 11 can also use the native NVMe driver after modifying the registry. Some users have already found that the performance of solid-state drives has improved significantly after testing in the early days. Now the professional storage website StorageReview also provides detailed real-machine testing.
Test results show that the native NVMe driver can significantly increase 4K and 64K random read bandwidth and IOPS, so the system will access data and operate faster when under heavy load or when multiple tasks are performed simultaneously.
Secondly, the native NVMe driver also significantly reduces 4K and 64K random read latencies, so high-load workloads will respond faster. By optimizing bandwidth and latency, users can also significantly experience performance improvements for latency-sensitive workloads.
This last native driver also proves that regardless of the size of the database, it can reduce processor usage during sequential read and write operations, reduce processor resource overhead through data transfer optimization, thereby freeing up more resources for other high-load tasks or background tasks (this also means that overall power consumption is actually reduced).
The test platform built by this website consists of 2 AMD EPYC 9754 processors, 768GB DDR5-4800 memory and 16 P5316 30.72 TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs. The operating system running is also Windows Server 2025 (specific version is Build 26100.32370).
Note: Both Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 have built-in native NVMe drivers. The test results depend on the hardware configuration. Whether it is a positive or negative effect, the overall trend in different operating systems is basically the same.
The main test results are as follows:
The random read performance improvement is the most obvious, with 4K and 64K random read performance improving by 64.89% and 22.71%
64K sequential read and write performance remains within normal error limits, but increasing the block size from 64K to 128K continues to improve random read performance by 6.65%
In terms of sequential write performance, using 64K block size brings a significant 12.13% performance improvement, but the performance does not continue to improve after increasing to 128K
In terms of latency results, random read latency improved significantly, with 4K and 64K read latency falling by 38.46 and 13.39% respectively.
Latency on sequential writes has increased however, with 64K write latency increasing by 39.85%, while switching to 128K alleviates performance issues
In terms of processor usage, during sequential read operations, the CPU usage of 4K and 64K operations is reduced by 7.78% and 12% respectively.
In terms of sequential write CPU usage, the CPU usage is reduced by 12.66% and 11.1% respectively during 4K and 64K operations.
From the above results, we can see that the native NVMe driver is crucial for both enterprises and individual consumers. For enterprises, the read and write performance will be significantly improved when running databases such as SQL. For individual users, resource loading will be faster when playing games, shortening startup time and improving the gaming experience.
This native driver should have been launched several years ago, but the reality is that for the past 15 years, Windows users have been limited by Microsoft's outdated storage architecture. It is obvious that Microsoft's storage architecture cannot keep up with the advancement of modern solid-state drive technology.
With PCIe 5.0 SSDs bringing unprecedented performance, and PCIe 6.0 SSDs gradually entering the market, the need for modern storage architecture has become very urgent, which may be why Microsoft finally decided to develop native drivers.
Finally, Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 have built-in the latest native NVMe driver (nvmedisk.sys), but Microsoft has made it an optional feature, and users need to modify the registry to enable it.
Related articles:
Windows 11 25H2 hides new NVMe driver. Manually enabling it can greatly improve SSD performance, but there are risks
Windows 11 enables native NVMe SSD support with double-digit performance improvements