One of the many long-standing oddities of Windows is that it has never had native support for NVMe SSDs, despite them being around for well over a decade and being the standard option for modern gaming PCs. However, this just changed recently with Microsoft rolling out native support in Windows Server 2025, and now users have discovered a way of enabling the feature in Windows 11, too, bringing leaps in performance of up to 85%.
NVMe is the connection standard used by most modern M.2 SSDs, and, as you can see from our best gaming SSD guide, the ones we currently recommend for PC gamers are M.2 drives that use the NVMe standard. As such, there’s potential for big gains for millions of Windows 11 PCs. There are some major caveats to this news, though.
The first point to note is that this native driver support is only available to Windows 11 25H2 users by means of a registry update. The registry is Windows’ repository of internal settings that is notorious for being a ‘one false move and your PC’s bricked’ environment to mess around in, so it’s always a place to proceed with a lot of caution.
What’s more, with these changes made, there will likely be apps that don’t play well with the new driver. In particular, third-party SSD management apps, such as Samsung Magician or Western Digital Dashboard, aren’t currently compatible.
Perhaps the biggest reason to temper your expectations, though, is that the speed boost is almost entirely meaningless for most home PC users. As our reviews of the latest SSDs – such as the WD Black SN8100 and Samsung 9100 Pro – show, modern SSDs are already so fast that you almost certainly won’t notice the benefit in gaming or most other day-to-day tasks. There’s a reason our top-recommended SSD for gaming is the PCIe 4 WD Black SN850X, rather than an even faster, more expensive PCIe 5 drive.
That’s perhaps why this feature was rolled out for Windows Server 2025 first, with its Windows 11 support still not enabled without those registry tweaks. For many server applications – particularly AI – constant and high-speed SSD access is crucial, so even just a small bump in performance can be hugely beneficial.
The other reason to maybe not immediately go rummaging around in your PC’s registry is that the gains aren’t typically as high as 85%. A user on X (formerly Twitter) called ‘Mouse&Keyboard’ tested the new feature on an SK Hynix Platinum P41 2TB drive (see image above) and found it provided a 13% boost in the drive’s overall AS SSD benchmark score. It did achieve as high as 16% and 22% in the random 4K and 4K-64Thrd tests, but sequential speed gains were minimal.
Meanwhile, a Reddit user named ‘Cheetah2kkk’ posted another test using the MSI Claw 8 AI+ gaming handheld equipped with a 4TB Crucial T705 SSD. Their tests again showed modest sequential speed gains but larger gains in random read/write performance. In the CrystalDiskMark random read test, it gained 12% after enabling the driver, but most impressive of all is the massive 85% speed increase in the random write test for this particular setup.
If you do fancy trying this potential speed boost yourself, the registry change instructions can be found here. As we say, though, this isn’t a change we recommend most users try, though.
Instead, we expect support for this feature to eventually be made official, saving you having to potentially mess anything up in your Windows registry, and giving time for developers to update their programs to properly support the changes.
