By Mark Mantel
Publication Date: 2025-12-18 16:58:00
High-end SSDs with PCI Express connectivity are set to become significantly faster under Windows, while Microsoft promises a substantial reduction in processor load. The reason is a long-overdue modernization of how Microsoft’s operating systems handle read and write commands to storage devices. Until now, Windows has apparently only supported the widely used Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) protocol to a limited extent. NVMe is based on the physical PCI Express interface, which most modern SSDs for M.2 slots use.
Although Microsoft has a hardware-independent NVMe driver, Windows has been translating NVMe commands into Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) until now. Microsoft writes about this in a blog post. SCSI originally emerged in the 80s and was not a major bottleneck even during the SATA era. It was only the massive parallelization of accesses to PCIe SSDs that left SCSI behind.
Server version leads the way
Windows Server 2025 is…
