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Cake day: February 18th, 2025

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  • Here’s a reply from an ―allegedly― ex-employee at Msft you can find in the comment section of the article:

    There is a lot of confusion on this thread between NVMe Storage Controller drivers and Disk drivers, e.g. “we have always been able to replace NVMe drivers”. Previous driver releases, e.g. by Samsung, are for the NVMe Storage Controller, which you don’t see in Device Manager unless you view by connection. The inbox driver is “Standard NVM Express Controller” or stornvme.sys. Samsung’s driver was secnvme.sys.

    The title of this TPU story is misleading; there is no new NVMe (controller) driver, there is a new disk layer driver nvmedisk.sys that is just an optimization of disk.sys that provides marginally better performance for NVMe drives (some SCSI command translations removed; multiple queues supported; presumably latency optimization and cache flush behavior). This is not really an “NVMe driver” because it’s not the controller driver. The disk layer driver is not super specific to a particular storage medium; this is just optimization to pair better with stornvme. It’s possible that you could force install nvmedisk.sys on HDD and it may even work, albeit unreliably and/or slowly.

    Source: I worked at MS for decades. You know that checkbox in Device Manager for drives that says “Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device”? That was me.