Microsoft is finally modernizing the way Windows handles commands for reading and writing data on SSDs. This represents one of the biggest changes in the Windows storage infrastructure in more than ten years, and the biggest benefit will be PCIe SSDs of the latest generation.
Until now, Windows, despite the official support for the NVMe protocol, translated the commands of the internal NVMe driver into the old SCSI system, a technology developed back in the eighties. In the SATA era this was not a significant limitation, but the massive parallelization of accesses on modern PCIe SSDs made SCSI a performance bottleneck.
Windows Server 2025 is the first to get a modernized NVMe model
Windows Server 2025 becomes the first Microsoft OS with true, NVMe support built in at the system level. In the current version, the function can be manually activated via a PowerShell command that modifies a registry key. After the reboot, the NVMe SSDs are no longer displayed under the classic Drives section, but move to Storage Disks, which confirms that the new system is activated.
The biggest jump in performance is expected with the PCIe 5.0 SSD model. Microsoft’s internal tests show an increase from about 1.8 million to 3.3 million IOPS results, which is a dramatic speedup for all applications that depend on a high number of parallel operations.
Profits aren’t just reserved for the fastest devices. Systems with PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 SSDs will experience significantly lower processor time consumption. Microsoft states that the new NVMe system delivers up to 45% fewer CPU cycles per I/O operation, as well as up to 80% more IOPS performance in tests with 4 KB random reads on the NTFS file system.
Microsoft describes this move as a key foundation for the modernization of the entire data system in the Windows environment. If the implementation in Windows Server 2025 goes without major problems, the new NVMe architecture will soon be introduced in Windows 11 as well.
The NVMe standard is already 14 years old, and the first SSD devices arrived in 2015. Since then, it has become a mandatory component of modern laptops and desktop systems, and with this upgrade, Windows will finally use it in a way worthy of its speed, reports heise online.