Hey, remember that Windows 11 update that was crashing SSDs in computers everywhere? Turns out Microsoft is innocent…this time. According to Phision, the problem was with some preview builds that SSD reviewers and PC component specialists got, as they were not the final, consumer-made version.
How can we tell? Why, because Phision itself told The Verge in an emailed statement, of course! According to the company, some SSDs that use some of Phision’s own controllers had an outdated firmware, which brought about the crashing bug as soon as the Windows 11 update hit.
Aaaaaand…said models where distributed to content creators and some media specialists as preview builds. Spoiler: journalists tend to get early hands-on experience on most things.
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What Windows 11 update? Here’s a quick recap
As we reported back in August, a recent Windows 11 Update (labeled “KB5063878”, but also “KB5062660”, as we’ve learned) seemingly came with a bug that caused solid state drivers (SSDs) to become unstable and, in the worst case, even disappear from the system during heavy, continuous write operations.
And as “heavy, continuous write operations” can mean a plethora of things, none of them are indeed heavier than gaming: you see, pretty much anything you do when playing games on your PC requires writing data on your storage units—the SSDs, in this case. Save a game? Writing. Shader caching? Asset streaming? Gameplay capture and recording? Writing, writing, writing.
So by doing any activity related to PC gaming, you were pretty much at risk of triggering the bug and kissing your data goodbye (or, at the very least, manually finding it and turning it on, in layman’s terms).
And of course, because Microsoft is Microsoft, blame for the bug quickly shifted to the company, who wasn’t exactly forthcoming when offering a solution back then…because it didn’t have any. We ourselves had to come up with a quick list of improvised solutions while we waited.
And wait we did, as it turns out, Microsoft nuh-ud’d its way into non blaming territory, rightfully so, and the problem was found to have another culprit, in true, soap-opera fashion: the SSD component supplier itself! (Editor’s note: play for full effect!)
Well, as Phision says it, the problem lies with “early versions of firmware and BIOS” in their statement—“many of the reports originate from media testing conducted on hardware running early versions of firmware and BIOS”, the company’s GM and President of Phison US, Michael Wu, has stated.
“These versions are performance preview drives and are not identical to those provided to end users through official distribution channels. We have observed that outdated firmware is still being used on some SSDs and we encourage any reviewers facing this to leverage updated channel firmware readily available through manufacturer-provided update utilities.”
The company was able to replicate the problem on older firmware devices, but newer ones ran smoothly without any problems. Back in our original reporting, we listed a bunch of confirmed cases happening in certain SSD models (such as the Corsair Force MP600 and SanDisk Extreme Pro M.2 NVMe, for instance).
In order to fix it, you can:
- Identify the manufacturer of your SSD
- Go to the manufacturer’s website.
- Download and run the specific firmware update utility for your drive model.
Bear in mind, this is not the Windows 11 update, but a firmware update specifically for your SSD device. Make sure to get the latest version, install it, and then updating Windows, which should run normally afterwards and you’ll get your fix of Cyberpunk 2077 on your PC in no time.
