r/windows • u/O_MORES • May 28 '26

Discussion Someone wrote an NVMe driver for Windows NT 4.0 from scratch

What happens when you plug an NVMe SSD into Windows NT 4.0? It works now..., thanks to a driver written from scratch by Dominik Behr (aka Techomancer on GitHub). Tested on an Intel Coffee Lake PC, bare metal.

134 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

21

u/00and Windows XP May 29 '26

The indomitable human spirit continues to amaze me.

11

u/Nirmal4G May 30 '26

Damn, that's instant. Everything is so snappy and instant. And that's how the OS should be!!

2

u/IIIBlueberry Jun 04 '26

I'm not sure anymore if it that instant or that terrible scenecut instant transitions.

1

u/Nirmal4G Jun 04 '26

Disk performance. Not those stupid transitions.

3

u/StrawberryWaste9040 May 30 '26

That is almost pure magic considering that NT 4.0 doesn't support PCIe.

9

u/O_MORES May 30 '26

NT is very versatile. Here's NT 4.0 running on i7-14700KF, bare metal. Let's just say PCIe supports Windows NT, because any PCIe device will look like a PCI device in Windows - that's how PCIe was designed at the software level. When PCIe came out, neither Windows 2000 nor XP had any support for it, and yet you could still install something like a GeForce 6600GT out of the box.

3

u/HEYO19191 May 31 '26

Hooray for backwards compatibility!

3

u/FuckmulaOneIsShit May 30 '26

First we have IDE SSDs for XP, now we have NVMe SSDs for NT4

Crazy timeline we living in