By Paul Thurrott
Publication Date: 2025-12-22 15:34:00
It seems obvious in retrospect, but thanks to the performance gains in modern SSDs, Microsoft has started rolling out hardware-accelerated BitLocker capabilities in Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025.
“As Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives continue to evolve, their ability to deliver extremely fast data transfer rates has set new expectations for system responsiveness and application performance,” Microsoft’s Rafal Sosnowski explains. “While this is a major benefit for users, it also means that any additional processing, such as real-time encryption and decryption by BitLocker, can become a bottleneck if not properly optimized.”
To address this issue, Microsoft announced hardware-accelerated BitLocker at Ignite 2025 back in November, after having added it to the latest versions of Windows 11 (25H2) and Windows Server (2025 with the September Update) alongside UFS (Universal Flash Storage)…
