It turns out that Windows has been holding your NVMe SSDs back for years. It’s been treating these modern SSDs like they’re older SSDs. For those who aren’t aware, NVMe SSDs connect directly to your computer’s PCIe lanes instead of using older SAT connections, letting them move data several times fast with lower latency and better multitasking. Or at least, that’s what they theoretically should be doing.
Luckily, Microsoft has developed a new driver called nvmedisk.sys, which is designed to take proper advantage of your NVMe SSD. If your Windows 11 is at least version 25H2, then the driver is already on your computer. By enabling it, you should be able to see significant performance improvements.
In this guide, we’ll talk about how to use Window 11’s Hidden NVMe Driver to boost SSD performance.
Why This New Driver Matters
Most Windows 11 systems use a legacy storage driver that communicates with NVMe SSDs through an older emulation layer. This isn’t an awful approach, but it does introduce extra latency and CPU overhead because commands that are meant for the faster NVMe hardware are translated into a protocol designed for much older drives.
Enter the new driver – nvmedisk.sys. This new driver lets Windows communicate directly with the NVMe SSDs without the translation step. That means that the newer SSDs can finally take full advantage of their hardware by providing faster data transfers, better responsiveness, and lower CPU usage. This should be especially noticeable in workloads involving random read/write operations.
There have been various tech benchmarks and community tests over the years that seem to suggest it can produce real gains. Some have even reported up to 80% increase in improved speeds, but most seem to report more modest but still noticeable increases.
Before We Begin
Before we start, you’ll need to remember a couple of important things.
- Back up your data. You’ll be modifying the Windows Registry, and if something goes wrong, you could experience a variety of serious problems up to and including a failure to boot.
- Uninstall third-party SSD management software. Tools like Samsung Magician or Western Digital Dashboard can interfere with the new driver and lead to conflicts or system instability.
- Compatibility isn’t guaranteed. Not all NVMe SSDs behave the same. There can potentially be some rare incompatibilities.
- Make sure you’re compatible. You need to have version 25H2 to enable this driver. Check your version by going to your settings, going to the systems tab, and scrolling down to your Windows specifications.
A Step-by-Step Guide On Enabling the Native NVMe Driver
The actual process on enabling the driver is fairly simple.
- Open Windows Powershell by pressing the Windows key and typing “PowerShell” into the search bar. Make sure you run it as Administrator.
- We will input three different commands in here. Make sure to copy these commands without quotes and press enter after each one.
- “reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetPoliciesMicrosoftFeatureManagementOverrides /v 735209102 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f”
- “reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetPoliciesMicrosoftFeatureManagementOverrides /v 1853569164 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f”
- “reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetPoliciesMicrosoftFeatureManagementOverrides /v 156965516 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f”
- Restart your computer.
If nothing went wrong, your computer will boot up without any issues and it will have loaded the new settings. If your PC doesn’t boot because something went wrong along the way, then you’ll need to boot the PC up in Safe Mode, which is why you should have backed up your data before doing this.
Verification and Results
Now for the moment of truth. To check if it worked or not, hit the Windows key and enter “Device Manager” into the search bar.
The main difference after you open it is that your NVMe SSDs should now show up under “Storage Disks” and not “Disk Drives”. Once you find them there, double click on one of the drives. Navigate to Driver -> Driver Details. If nvmedisk.sys is listed as one of the drivers, then congratulations! You’ve done it!
As for results, I used CrystalDiskInfo to check my disk speeds. Here were my results from before I applied the changes:
And here they are after I applied the changes:
As you can see, it’s a somewhat mixed bag. However, you should remember that this tool only measures read and write speed. There are a number of things that are improved that this program doesn’t reflect, such as stability, general smoothness, and bootup speed. It’s not a drastic change or anything, but it is a noticeable improvement and it’s advisable to carry out these short and simple steps.
Optimizing Your SSD Speed
SSDs are arguably the most core component of your computer. It dictates how fast your computer runs, how fast you can load programs, and how many files your computer can store. All of that means that Microsoft’s recent update making your SSDs even faster than before a great peek into any kind of future optimization that Microsoft has in store for us. Best of all, the process is extremely simple, if not a little risky. With just a few simple commands, you could unlock a smoother and faster experience. We hope that this guide has helped you do that.
If you want to learn more ways to speed up your WIndows 11 PC, take a look at our guide on software tools that are killing your performance.
