Has anyone tested Microsoft’s Native NVMe support. It’s opt-in and they are claiming “Massive IOPS Gains” and lower latency.
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I betting wendel is preparing a video of it for us
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wait… they didn’t have this TILL NOW!? WTFBBQ?!
linux has had native nvme for along time
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So the actual thing that changed here is that while Windows supported NVME drives without needing any driver install or anything, it actually treated it as an iSCSI device, and now it has a distinction between HDDs and NVMEs? This distinction allows Windows server to now take advantage of specific functionality of NVME protocol and drives?
I honestly thought Windows had this for a long time as well. Has windows really been so hampered on drive performance and SSDs are about to suddenly get way faster at multitasking and latency? Doesnt make a lot of sense to me but okay.
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I am confused about this too.
In many/most storage benchmarks Windows performs roughly on par with Linux. Is Windows now going to blow Linux away in storage performance because of this update? I’m thinking the performance improvements by consolidating two stoage software stacks into one bigger storage software stack might not be as large as the hype suggests.
Or maybe the performance improvement is only applicable to really high throughput, high granularity databases as the IOPS numbers suggest?
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I was wondering if a driver file and .INF or something from Windows Server 2025 would let you enable it on Windows 11, but just three registry entries are needed, apparently?
Results looked odd. High queue depth and thread count Random 4K cratered -40%, 1Q1T went up 12%?
I’ll give it a try later probably.
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Oh I’m so testing this…
But also, the comments in the MS post:
- It’s only for Windows Server 2025 (supported) - but it also works on Windows 11
- “Happy Azure Localling”???
- It breaks SQL Server which had a workaround to be deployed on NVMe drives (which is interesting)
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Breaks SQL server.
hahaha
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Also reverts back if you add another nvme. Ill wait for an official release.
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Welp! This just crashed my AM4 server… 
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Seems pretty margin of error?
FFXIV Dawntrail loading times went from 7.51s to 7.17/7.13s.
200 points higher in 3DMark Storage. The last test was 7% faster pre-patch. The rest were 3-9% faster post-patch.
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Windows 98 just got native NVMe support too and the speedup is immense, on the order of 10,000% faster than the CSM layer alone.
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Tried it on an N100 mini pc, the random speeds went down 3-4x, making the system nearly unusable. On lunar Lake it seemed about equal. Ryzen 4600H a little improvement but not across the board. Definitely not ready for prime time yet.
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“It would be exciting to see what Optane drives can do with this native NVMe drive since they excel in random performance.”
I believe they’re calling your name Wendell.
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Why is Microsoft only now hitting the ball on this one? I thought proprietary was supposed to have all the bells, and whistles lol
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I’ve added the keys, flipped one pvscsi drive over to NVMe, ran a test, then flipped the other two drives over to NVMe. I didn’t have to re-add the keys – they’re still in my registry. Devices by connection:
All three NVMe controllers are using stornvme.sys as outlined in the articles. At the Windows level I just added the keys and rebooted.
With my Windows 11 25H2 guest beating up the host’s Linux page cache I see no benefit at Q1T1 nor with big block sequential I/O. But with DiskSPD.exe at 6 threads and a deep queue depth (32/64/128 etc) I’m seeing roughly double the 4k random read IOPs as the original setup with pvscsi. I’ve never seen a VMware Workstation guest approach 100k IOPS before but here we are.
I believe 25H2 fixed it.
Tested and analyzed by yours truly:
-Andrew Waag
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