PCIe Gen5 NVMe Drives Freezing on Windows Under Sustained I/O Loads

Question

My brand new Alienware Area-51 AAT2265 (Ryzen 9 9950X3d, RTX 5090, SK Hynix 2TB Gen5 NVMe, 64GB of RAM) has been experiencing complete system deadlocks with Gen5 NVMe drives. No BSOD, no error, mouse doesn't move, Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing. The only option is a hard power reset. This started on the very first boot out of the box.

I spent three days isolating this. MemTest86 passed, Prime95 and FurMark passed, CrystalDiskInfo shows 100% health, BIOS is up to date. I tested two different Gen5 NVMe drives (SK Hynix PCB01 2TB and Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB) and both freeze under sustained I/O. A Gen3 Samsung 980 in the same slot works perfectly. I also tested across Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 LTSC (24H2), and Windows 10 LTSC 2021. All of them eventually deadlock with Gen5 drives, though Windows 11 triggers it far more frequently.

Event Viewer shows WHEA-Logger Event ID 17 corrected PCIe errors on the root port for the NVMe slot, and Kernel-Power Event ID 41 with BugcheckCode 0.

The issue is stornvme.sys. When I enable the native NVMe driver (nvmedisk.sys) via the registry feature flags for 25H2, the problem goes away completely. The same workload that deadlocked every single time on stornvme.sys now runs without any issues on nvmedisk.sys. I also noticed that stornvme.sys was causing the drive to repeatedly drop to 0KB/s throughput during sustained writes, whereas nvmedisk.sys keeps the writes sustained without those constant drops.

This appears to be a driver-level bug in stornvme.sys specifically affecting PCIe Gen5 NVMe drives under sustained I/O. It does not affect Gen3 drives. Please investigate and prioritize a fix, as this causes complete system lockups on any system with a Gen5 NVMe boot drive.

Answer 1

@Sammy Packer

Check storage latest driver and bios are installed