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.
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