Discovery: Windows 11 Affects The Speed Of SSDs

In the last few months, there has been an increasing number of user reports on problems that occur in the interaction of Windows 11 and NVMe SSDs. Currently, the cause is difficult to determine precisely because the symptoms differ significantly with different drives.

NVMe SSDs Slowed Down On Windows 11

A thread in the Microsoft question-and-answer forum provides indications of persistent problems. As the author describes here, he found in several tests that Windows 11 can offer “only 45% of the random write speed in Nvme SSDs” compared to its predecessor. In an answer, another person affected describes an even more drastic reduction: “Random write accesses are only 12% and random read accesses are only 65% ​​of the value they should have.”

According to Neowin, similar descriptions can also be found with a look at the Microsoft Feedback Hub. The details described here lead to speculation that the problem could be related to drivers that Microsoft is providing. “On further tests, all my Nvme drives that use the Microsoft driver have this problem, but my Intel 905P, which has its own driver provided by Intel, is working at full power,” said user Jeff C. on his speculative Failure analysis.

Other independent contributions suggest that this is at least one hot lead: “Intel Optane 905p is not affected and I assume that this is due to the fact that it uses its own NVMe driver,” said another Microsoft portal user.

Microsoft working on the issue?

There is currently no official statement on the problem from Microsoft. In an older thread on Reddit, Group employee Neal Christiansen, username “neochristim”, seems to confirm the problem: “I am part of the Microsoft filesystem team and am investigating this problem.” Christiansen has not yet delivered an update. For the time being, it remains to be clarified until Microsoft speaks out.