Tuesday, December 23rd 2025
Windows 11 25H2 Includes a Faster NVMe Driver Needing Manual Installation
Although Windows has had awareness of the NVMe storage media protocol since Windows 8.1, it turns out that the stock Microsoft driver for NVMe devices, disk.sys, offers suboptimal performance. This driver dates back to 2006, and is part of Microsoft's oldest internal basic drivers. Disk.sys appears to treat NVMe devices like SCSI drives. Microsoft released a new native driver with a greater degree of awareness of NVMe with Windows 11 25H2 (client) and Windows 2025 (server) operating systems, called nvmedisk.sys. The easiest way to check if your drive is using the older driver would be to bring up Device Manager, collapse "Disk Drives," open the Properties of your drive, go to the Driver tab, and click on the "driver details" button.
Notebookcheck made a fascinating discovery that has the potential to unlock greater performance with your NVMe drives, if they are compatible. Apparently, nvmedisk.sys significantly improves performance, both in sequential and random workloads. Using this driver, however, is fraught with risks. Not all NVMe SSDs support it, and if incompatible, it could break Windows 11 boot. The publication put out a guide on how to get Windows 11 to use nvmedisk.sys. This involves changing three Windows Registry values. It would be a good idea to image or backup your data before you tinker with this, so you can perform a full image restore if it breaks Windows booting. The guide can be found in the source links below, use it at your own risk.
Sources:
Notebookcheck, HotHardware
Notebookcheck made a fascinating discovery that has the potential to unlock greater performance with your NVMe drives, if they are compatible. Apparently, nvmedisk.sys significantly improves performance, both in sequential and random workloads. Using this driver, however, is fraught with risks. Not all NVMe SSDs support it, and if incompatible, it could break Windows 11 boot. The publication put out a guide on how to get Windows 11 to use nvmedisk.sys. This involves changing three Windows Registry values. It would be a good idea to image or backup your data before you tinker with this, so you can perform a full image restore if it breaks Windows booting. The guide can be found in the source links below, use it at your own risk.
115 Comments on Windows 11 25H2 Includes a Faster NVMe Driver Needing Manual Installation
eg:
Modded NVMe Drivers for Intel(R) Optane Controllers
If malware is a concern?;
read the .inf file And send the .sys etc to VirusTotal.
I trust Fernando by now. He has this 'down!' after all these years.
But still: EVERYTHING I install goes through VirusTotal, if not more places.
Microsoft is dead end or for those who enjoy headaches
I didn’t even think to do a before/after. I did double check Direct Storage is working as my game/s use it.
AFAIK, because the MS's overzealous flushing.
MSI X870 E Carbon MOBO,
Here's my results:
Here's my results with default driver from 2022 and 2025, plus the Modded Solidigm driver:
In Elevated CMD (Admin) or Powershell/Terminal (Admin) Run the following commands:
- reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 735209102 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
- reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 1853569164 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
- reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 156965516 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
Restart Computer, if you did it correctly disk layout in Device Manager will change:Before
After
Also, don't enable "Turn off Windows write -cache buffer flushing on the device". Found it's highly unstable with this driver<------ (Correction, it's not unstable, just this driver needs to have approval and enabling in the registry to allow Safe Mode to permit, which can easily be done).In the meantime;Deskmodder (de)
Best regards,
Fred.
Increasing OS, driver and app reliability: Delivering a smoother, more dependable Windows 11 experience by strengthening system stability, driver quality and app reliability across our vibrant ecosystem of silicon, ISV and OEM partners. Our priorities include:
- Strengthening the Windows foundation by reducing OS level crashes, improving driver quality and app stability across our ecosystem so PCs run smoothly and reliably every day
blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/The updated code is only for those that try and enable this for the first time.
It seems that, at least for now, this can be enabled “on the server side”; otherwise, the IDs wouldn't exist. This means the feature will soon be—or may already be—‘officially’ supported in the client as well. After all, the workaround via the registry was anything but “official” and, until now, has only resulted in the inability to boot into the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE). Yes, I know; thanks to MDL, a workaround for this is known.
Regards,
Fred.
My second and third drives connected via the chipset only gained about 1-3% of performance.
Thankfully there was no performance regression.
www.lemon-web.net/lemon-blog/technical-solutions/microsoft-s-native-nvme-driver-could-be-one-of-the-biggest-windows-storage-upgrades-in-years