Editor's take: In recent years, Microsoft has developed a reputation for rolling out Windows updates that are dangerous, insecure, or simply unreliable. The company was even accused of "killing" solid-state drives with its August patch cycle. However, the root cause of this particular issue has now been identified.
No, Microsoft's recent Windows 11 updates weren't killing HDDs and SSDs in droves. The issue is real, but it has since been traced back to the hardware used in the reports rather than the software itself. At least this time, Microsoft patches aren't to blame for making PC users' lives more miserable.
The alleged "SSD-killing" updates, KB5063878 and KB5062660 for Windows 11 24H2, were released in August. After installing them, an unspecified number of users reported system crashes during large file transfers. The finger was quickly pointed at Microsoft, an understandable reaction given the company's history of problematic patches.
However, Microsoft and its hardware partners were unable to reproduce the issue in their own lab environments. Phison, a Taiwanese manufacturer of NAND flash memory controllers and one of the potential culprits, ran more than 4,500 hours of testing and benchmarking without detecting a single bug.
A new twist in the story surfaced over the weekend when PCDIY!, a China-based hardware enthusiast group, shared its findings on Facebook. The group tested three different 2TB SSDs from Corsair, Quanta, and Apacer – all built around the same Phison PS5026-E26-52 controller.
Their results confirmed what Phison, Microsoft, and other vendors had already seen in controlled testing: the SSDs weren't actually dying, even under sustained heavy write workloads.
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.