News Win11's august update and some WD SSDs may be problematic

[mikeymikec]

MSN

I found this when searching for information about a bizarre issue I'm experiencing with a new Lenovo Yoga 6 (AMD 4000 series) laptop. It clean-installed 23H2 without issue, updated to 24H2 without issue, then I noticed that "optimisation isn't available" for the WD SN530 SSD, told it to do a full disk check, it started the disk check at the very least but never booted Windows again after that (perpetual loading circle). Event log shows multiple ntfs errors regarding the MFT, no amount of chkdsk /f /v /r has helped and the recovery environment refuses to roll back either the quality or feature updates, and system restore fails saying that a disk check needs doing.

My issue may have nothing to do with the story, but it certainly is an interesting coincidence. Lenovo claims that the laptop is compatible with Win11 (it came with Win10) and didn't have any useful suggestions apart from a clean install. I'm going with Win10 for the moment purely out of curiosity to check the defrag utility. - edit - Win10 and defrag seems to be fine, I'm going to let it play with Win10 updates for a bit to see whether it stumbles.

 

[mikeymikec]

https://www.techspot.com/news/109115-windows-11-patch-linked-ssd-data-loss-reports.html

The laptop I'm working on has accepted the August update on 23H2 without incident so far, but if that twitter user is correct, a lot of gamers' setups are going to go belly-up over what seems to be a case of Microsoft messing with core OS storage code in a mandatory update rather than deferring such a change to an avoidable feature update.

 

[coercitiv]

It's unclear to me what exactly is happening, but it seems that at the very least some Windows updates expose issues with various SSD controllers, leading to all kinds of weird behavior and/or failures.

Some more links:

Should you hold off on Windows updates? This SSD bug makes a strong case

Microsoft’s KB5063878 update is under fire for breaking SSDs and users are scrambling for fixes

www.windowscentral.com

Silicon Motion: None of Our Controllers Affected by the Windows 11 Bug

Silicon Motion is a major SSD controller vendor, with a contemporary lineup of controllers spanning all client, enterprise, and consumer flash storage form-factors. It is also a major competitor to Phison, which recently announced that specific SSD models based on some of its controllers are...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[mikeymikec]

It's unclear to me what exactly is happening, but it seems that at the very least some Windows updates expose issues with various SSD controllers, leading to all kinds of weird behavior and/or failures.

It reads to me like Microsoft messed with code pertaining to storage system management in a mandatory monthly update. I suppose it might have been to address a security vulnerability, but I suspect it wasn't because another article I read on the topic talked about significant performance improvements as a result of the update. If so, the devs and/or management at Microsoft need their heads examined for YOLO'ing code that should be marked as the holiest of holies, code that has to be audited in multiple ways and tested to the nth degree.

 

[DavidC1]

And this is why I don't blindly update to latest versions. In fact on my laptop I've stopped it entirely.

 

[coercitiv]

Ignore the definitive title of the article, but it does sound like some Phison drives had issues due to being shipped with incorrect firmware:

Windows 11 cleared of all charges for killing SSDs, the real culprit is faulty firmware​

According to PCDIY!, Phison even dispatched four engineers to assist with the investigation. This collaboration uncovered a critical clue: the Corsair and Quanta drives were running on an unfinished, pre-release firmware version not intended for retail use.

The group speculated (and Phison later confirmed) that this early firmware was the real cause of the instability. Unlike the finalized firmware shipping on retail drives, the engineering preview caused crashes under stress. To prove the point, Phison ran the same stress tests (100GB to 1TB sustained writes) on consumer-available SSD models and reported no failures or crashes.

It's a huge mess either way, just not one made by Microsoft. This time. Maybe.