Three little lines to add to the Windows registry are all it takes to unlock our NVMe SSDs.
You may not be aware of it, but until September 2025 and even October, Microsoft had not developed a real driver dedicated to the operation of NVMe SSDs within its Windows. For good measure - and it worked rather well, as performance was always excellent - Microsoft was doing a kind of translation of NVMe commands based on an old SCSI driver. However, the trick couldn't last forever, and in order to guarantee the best possible support for Windows Server 2025 users, Microsoft has finally deployed a genuine Windows driver designed for NVMe SSDs and, in particular, to exploit the remarkable performance of PCIe Gen 4 and, above all, PCIe Gen 5 models.
We've more or less already hinted at it, but the driver in question is currently only available on Windows Server 2025, and therefore not for our simple Windows 11. Why this limitation? No doubt Microsoft prefers to take the time to test the thing in detail, and no doubt the fact that Windows Server 2025 is managed by system administrators makes Microsoft less afraid of a driver that is still in its infancy. In any case, for the time being, there's no question of taking advantage of the driver and its performance via Windows Update, but a "solution" does exist, provided you're not afraid to modify the system registry and have made a full backup beforehand.
Microsoft's NVMe driver can be activated very simply, by accessing the registry and adding the three lines below, then rebooting the system.
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 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
With the lines added and the machine rebooted, all you have to do - once on the Windows desktop - is glance at the Device Manager to see the change: SSDs are no longer recognized as " Disk Drives ", but as " Storage Disks ". A change of name that proves the success of the maneuver. The Notebookcheck site, which details the entire procedure, measured performance before and after deploying the trick. The gains are not extraordinary - and probably even imperceptible in use for 90% of the population - but they are real. It's up to you to decide whether you're prepared to risk your data: some users have indeed reported that, after modifying the registry, their SSD was simply no longer recognized. Fortunately, this seems to be a rare occurrence.
