Bypassing the Bottleneck: How Microsoft’s Native NVMe Driver Delivers an 80% IOPS Surge

Microsoft has introduced a newly developed native NVMe SSD capability in Windows Server 2025, effectively a new driver that bypasses the legacy SCSI interface to deliver a meaningful performance uplift. The feature is positioned to unlock greater performance for server platforms, with data-intensive workloads such as databases like Microsoft SQL Server cited as areas of substantial gain.

Native NVMe support is already available in Windows Server 2025 (with the October 2025 update or later), and while no equivalent feature is officially exposed in Windows 11, testing of similar functionality appears in Windows 11 version 25H2. After enabling native NVMe support in Windows 11 25H2, results reported on an SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB SSD show the AS SSD benchmark score increasing from 10,032 to 11,344, a 13% rise, with random write performance improving by 16% in 4K and 22% in 4K-64Thrd.

Users testing a Crucial T705 4TB SSD in an MSI Claw 8 AI+ gaming handheld reported that sequential reads and writes changed little, but random read throughput rose by 12% and random write surged by 85%. The improvements are framed as improvements in IOPS efficiency, and the guidance notes that the feature remains experimental in Windows 11, advising caution for manual registry-enabled activation, with a registry path provided and three DWORD values listed.