Hello. Just registered to foster discussion on this topic.
Intel has discontinued the NVMe drivers for their Optane SSDs. This was the “SetupNVMe.exe” installer for Windows.
Quote from the page: “The Intel® NVMe drivers for Intel® SSDs have reached end-of-life (EOL) and will no longer be available starting on February 6, 2023. Users are encouraged to use the Microsoft inbox NVMe driver.”
However, the download link to SetupNVMe.exe is still shown on some of the downloads pages, for Optane drives.
I actually contacted Intel about this, the download links are not working due to the discontinuation.
This is sad news, as the Intel NVMe driver was more performant in Windows than Windows’s built-in driver, including in my own testing. However, I’ve had no issues using the Windows NVMe driver, so far.
I’m interested to know what Intel did to optimize their drivers for more performance.