Image: Sick Visuals / Shutterstock.com

Microsoft recently started offering users of modern SSDs an option to significantly increase their drive speeds. Specifically, this involves a performance boost for NVMe drives.

NVMe stands for Non-Volatile Memory Express and is a particularly fast protocol for SSDs that communicates directly with the processor via the PCIe interface. Because of this, NVMe SSDs outperform conventional SATA SSDs. Until now, however, Windows didn’t offer a native driver for NVMe drives, which limited their performance.

This changed in December 2025 when Microsoft announced Native NVMe for Windows Server 2025, which is also available on Windows 11. However, you must manually activate it yourself to take advantage of its benefits. Here’s how to enable it and whether it’s worth doing so.

The advantages of Native NVMe

According to Microsoft, here are the advantages:

• Massive IOPS increases: Actual performance limit of the hardware is fully unlocked.
• Lower latency: Shorter round-trip times for each operation.
• Higher CPU efficiency: More computing power for applications instead of storage overhead.
• Support for advanced NVMe features: For example, multi-queue and direct command transmission.

In specific use cases, this could improve sequential speeds by up to 500 MB/s as well as up to 80 percent more IOPS. In addition, using the native driver should save up to 45 percent in computing power.

These values may vary depending on your system and SSD type, of course. In general, however, users seem to benefit significantly from the performance boost—and all you need is a compatible NVMe SSD and Windows 11 25H2 to start taking advantage now.

There are some caveats, though

Before you turn this feature on, know that there’s a risk. According to some reports, problems can arise with certain SSDs. Some hard drive managers no longer recognize NVMe storage after the driver is enabled, while other drives disappear completely or get listed twice.

In addition, in a few cases, there was higher CPU utilization and/or lag, especially in games that use DirectStorage. Apparently, there’s a compatibility issue here that needs to be investigated further.

How to activate the NVMe boost

To activate the new NVMe driver in Windows 11, you should first check the driver details section of your storage drive in Device Manager and ensure that your drive is using StorNVMe.sys. Otherwise, activating this driver will have no effect on your system.

If compatible, there are two ways to activate the driver:

Option 1: Windows Registry

1. Use the Windows key + R keyboard shortcut to open the Run window, then type regedit to launch Registry Editor.
2. In Registry Editor, navigate to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides.
3. In this folder, right-click and add the following REG_DWORD values, each with hexadecimal value “1”: 156965516, 1853569164, 735209102.
4. Restart your PC.

If you want to undo the change, navigate back to the same folder and delete the three values. The change will take effect after restarting.

Option 2: PowerShell

Alternatively, you can use Windows PowerShell to enter the following commands (with admin rights):

1. reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 156965516 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
2. ​​​​​​​reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 1853569164 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
3. reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Policies\Microsoft\FeatureManagement\Overrides /v 735209102 /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
4. Restart your PC.

These two methods are currently the only ways to activate Native NVMe in Windows 11, as it’s actually intended for use under Windows Server. The performance boost is primarily aimed at businesses, but private users can also activate it to benefit.

However, there’s no guarantee that every NVMe SSD will respond to the change in the same way. The potential problems described above may still occur. If this is the case, you should undo the change and wait for Microsoft to update the drivers before trying again.

Further reading: Unlock more SSD performance with these 5 tweaks

This article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.

Author: Laura Pippig, Staff Writer, PC-WELT

Laura is an enthusiastic gamer as well as a movie and TV fan. After studying communication science, she went straight into a job at PCMagazin and Connect Living. Since then, she has been writing about everything to do with PCs and technology topics, and has been a permanent editor at our German sister site PC-WELT since May 2024.