Windows 11’s “bricked SSD update” scandal has a clearer culprit: the drives with the issue were running pre-release controller firmware.
That’s according to a Taiwan-based group of PC builders, confirmed by memeory component supplier Phison, whose controllers commonly feature in many popular NVMe drives.
What actually went wrong
Customers who encountered the issue said that their SSDs disappeared from Windows after installing the new Windows 11 24H2 package (KB5063878), while the system crashes and freezes when under a heavy load.
Initial efforts by Phison and Microsoft to replicate the problem bore no fruit — until researchers experimented with drives using “engineering preview firmware,” a tentative microcode that can ship on early samples.
Phison claims those preview builds were the common factor. Some of these same models, however, when tested using publicly available, consumer firmware, did not experience the failures—even after another stress period of 100GB and 1TB sequential write workloads. That is to say, the Windows update didn’t cause a healthy drive to fail; it exposed vulnerability in incomplete firmware.
Who uncovered the flaw
A do-it-yourself group in Taiwan, which ran tests to see how storage would fare under heavy benchmarks, observed repeatable failures on more than one SSD, including a Corsair Force Series MP600 2TB and Silicon Power US70 2TB. Following a comparison of labels and firmware IDs, they found out that each such console was sent with engineering firmware instead of the final version. The results were also confirmed by Phison at spot tests.
Why There’s a Problem with Preview Firmware
Engineered firmware typically includes final GSM tuning that vendors execute before retail release. That ranges from consideration for mature power-state transitions and garbage-collection thresholds to thermal throttling curves and corner-case handling of NVMe queues. A new system update (eg https://lwn.net/Articles/783870/ ) might become a perfect storm: because of the OS wait time for installation script or for the filesystem linearization process, a tens or a a hundreds gigabytes burst-write, no time for the idle I/O scheduler to reschedule it, and so on – all this for immature firmware to not recognize that its’s undert-publicized NVME is truncating the height due to the dumb way the firmware does the address arithmetics (let me remember yours 2016’s humorisms, James? excuse me if I back-complain, I had to catch up along this never-ending thread of yours).
Importantly, this is not to say the Windows storage stack is unsafe. It’s just that Windows’ typical, heavy update behavior can reveal weaknesses that production firmware is specially validated to be able to avoid. The crucial difference is, Phison has admitted consumer available firmware have passed these same stress tests.
How common is the risk?
It certainly seems there is a small exposure window. Preview firmware is often on reviewer samples, early test units, or drives sent to pssd before the final firmware image is sddp. The vast majority of retail drives, particularly those updated with a vendor’s utility at first boot, will already be on production firmware. That may be why there wasn’t large-scale telemetry from Microsoft and controller manufacturers that alerted them to a general pattern of failure.
Even so, the SSD world is a fractured one. A lot of brands use common controller platforms and reference designs, and a few missed firmware updates can start to roll downhill. Even a relatively small batch can make outsized noise if enthusiast communities and influencers get to them before the rest of us.
What to do now
Had a bunch of crashes or drive dropouts after installing KB5063878? Don’t rush to do anything drastic; first make sure your SSD’s firmware is up-to-date. Practical steps:
- Find out what controller and firmware you have: Device Manager, CrystalDiskInfo, or your vendor’s dashboard may be able to tell you current firmware revisions.
- Update with manufacturer tools: Some manufacturers, like Corsair or Silicon Power, offer programs which can apply approved production firmware for certain models.
- Back up: while it is generally routine, it is always a good to start with a full backup or system image before updating your device.
- Re-test under load: Upon completion of the update, run a moderate write workload, or your normal applications until you’re ready to put it back into mission critical.
Microsoft’s and Phison’s positions
Microsoft has claimed it uncovered no direct correlation between the Windows 11 update and the outages. Phison came to the same conclusion for production firmware drives and clarified they could only reproduce the problem with pre-release / engineering preview builds. That alignment leans the explanation towards a firmware issue vs an OS-level glitch.
How it could happen again — and how to prevent it
It’s not new for early firmware to make its way into the wild. Complexities in the supply chain, phased manufacturing ramps, and possible sampling of reviewers can play a part. The best things anybody can do are boring but effective: solid in-coming QA at the brand level; mandatory firmware checks prior to shipping; consumer-facing update prompts the instant the first time a drive is initialized.
For builders and IT administrators, it’s wise to add “firmware verification” to the build checklist. It’s the storage equivalent of updating a motherboard BIOS—unsightly but necessary, more often than not.
The bottom line
The Windows 11 update wasn’t quietly killing brand-new SSDs left and right; it was revealing a deficiency in a pre-release firmware that never should have made it to retail consumers.
The same models were solid, even under significant stress, with production firmware. If your machine hiccupped, a fast firmware inspection with update is the solution — not a rollback to a past OS.
