NVMe drives have been supported for a long time on Windows, but the definition of "native" has changed over time. Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 added it first, in the form of StorNVMe. As far as we can tell, this has been the standard way of interfacing with an NVMe drive since then, with Microsoft adapting NVMe devices to a storage model built around long-standing SCSI abstractions, rather than as its own protocol. Now, that's changing, as Microsoft is rolling out a truly native NVMe driver for Windows Server 2025 and, as a result, Windows 11, too.
Trying it out on a regular Windows 11 25H2 install is pretty easy, but be aware that it has reportedly caused users issues. I've been running it for over a week without problems, but some users have reported issues with disk managers not recognizing their NVMe storage correctly, and others have reported applications crashing entirely. Others have also said that it doesn't seem to work with DirectStorage-enabled games just yet, in turn causing high CPU usage and lag spikes, thanks to a lack of BypassIO support.
As well, it can make drives disappear entirely, or make them be detected twice, and some drives aren't supported at all. For example, my Crucial P3 Plus 4TB still shows up as a "regular" NVMe drive (this is likely because Crucial supplies their own drivers, according to Microsoft), whereas my Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB NVMe now uses the new driver.
If you're willing to deal with the risks, some users have reported as much as a 500 MB/s improvement to sequential speeds, though these will likely differ from drive to drive depending on workload, the controller in use, or the queue-depth involved. Microsoft has also said that from its testing, systems with the new driver enabled can deliver up to 80% more IOPS per second with 45% savings in CPU cycles per I/O on 4K random read workloads on NTFS.
How I enabled the new Windows 11 NVMe driver
You can do it with the Registry Editor or a terminal
Enabling the new Windows 11 NVMe driver requires you to be on Windows 11 25H2. As well, you'll need to check the Driver details section of your storage drive in the Windows 11 Device Manager and make sure that your drive is using StorNVMe.sys. Otherwise, enabling this driver won't do anything for your system, as it will continue to use the vendor-provided driver for your SSD.
To enable it, you have two options. The first uses the Registry Editor, and the second uses PowerShell or Command Prompt with administrative privileges. To add using the Registry Editor:
- Press Windows key and R, then type "regedit"
- Navigate to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides
-
Add the following REG_DWORD type values in this folder, each with a hexadecimal value of "1":
- 156965516
- 1853569164
- 735209102
- Reboot
Alternatively, you can open an elevated terminal and run the following commands:
- reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 156965516 /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 735209102 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
- Reboot
This will then enable the new NVMe driver. If you have any issues, you can open the Registry Editor, navigate to that folder, and delete the three values that were added. Once you've rebooted, it'll be disabled again, and you'll be using StorNVMe.
How is the Windows 11 NVMe driver different?
Both drivers are technically "native"
What Microsoft has historically called "native" NVMe support on Windows was never about bypassing the existing storage architecture. When NVMe first arrived on Windows, StorNVMe was a Microsoft-supplied miniport driver that allowed the OS to enumerate, boot from, and operate NVMe drives without relying on proprietary drivers from vendors. From a user and application perspective, that was native support: NVMe worked out of the box, behaved like any other disk, and integrated cleanly with the rest of the Windows storage stack.
Under the hood, however, NVMe was still being accommodated inside a storage model that far pre-dated it. The Windows storage stack had been built around SCSI assumptions for decades, and NVMe devices were effectively adapted to that model. Internally, Windows would translate storage requests expressed in SCSI-style abstractions into NVMe commands before issuing them to the drive. For years, this was not a practical problem. Even with the overhead of translation, NVMe drives were so much faster than SATA and SAS that the abstraction cost was largely invisible outside of very high-end or server workloads.
That distinction is what Microsoft is now addressing with what it's calling "Native NVMe" in Windows Server 2025. This is not Microsoft forgetting about StorNVMe or a sudden addition of NVMe support that didn't exist before. Instead, it's a redesign of how Windows handles NVMe I/O at a lower level, removing the need to treat NVMe devices as if they were SCSI disks and eliminating the SCSI abstraction dependency entirely. In this new model, NVMe is handled as NVMe end-to-end, allowing Windows to issue and manage NVMe commands directly rather than funneling them through legacy abstractions.
In terms of practical benefits, the change won't necessarily be a perceptible one in day-to-day tasks. Instead, it makes it so Windows scales more efficiently as NVMe devices push higher queue depths, higher IOPS, and lower latencies. For enterprise storage, multi-controller NVMe devices, and future consumer hardware that leans harder on parallelism, removing that translation overhead can help a lot. It's also why Microsoft is framing this as an architectural change rather than a simple "faster driver," and why it first appeared in Windows Server rather than as a default feature on consumer builds.
On Windows 11 25H2, enabling the new NVMe driver with the Registry Editor is basically enabling the driver from Server 2025, rather than enabling a fully supported implementation for Windows 11. The underlying changes exist thanks to the shared codebase, but they're not yet the default path and come with caveats. Reports of incompatibilities with disk management tools, application instability, and missing features such as BypassIO support for DirectStorage-enabled games make it clear that this is still a transitionary period. In other words, Windows has supported NVMe "natively" for years in the sense that it worked out of the box, but only now is Microsoft in the process of making NVMe an actually-supported protocol throughout the entire storage stack rather than a high-performance device that's been adapted to work with legacy SCSI.