After 4,500 hours of testing, SSD controller specialist Phison rules out allegations that a Windows 11 update is bricking drives

Windows 11 with the Start menu on the left — (Image credit: Microsoft)

Correlation without causation was the caveat we applied last week to reports that the KB5063878 update for Windows 11 was nuking SSDs and HDDs. Now SSD controller maker Phison has reported back on an extensive investigation into the alleged issue. The outcome? Nothing to see here.

In a statement to WCCFTech, Phison said it had, "dedicated over 4,500 cumulative testing hours to the drives reported as potentially impacted and conducted more than 2,200 test cycles. We were unable to reproduce the reported issue, and no partners or customers have reported that the issue affected their drives at this time."

To recap, it was suggested that problems can occur after the KB5063878 Windows 11 update and during heavy write operations to specific storage, with suspected culprits including the operation of the drive cache and "a memory leak in Windows’ OS-buffered cache region" and the consequence being a "high likelihood of file corruption when symptoms occur."

A WD Black SN7100 SSD installed inside a gaming PC. — The WD Black SN7100 is one of the drives claimed to *not* be affected by the update. (Image credit: Future)

As we reported previously, a busy Reddit thread discussing the reported issue is very much split on opinion and experiences. One poster said, "Updated my Windows 11 yesterday. I had the same issue while updating. It restarted and no SSD was being seen after that. I thought I lost it completely. Tried checking the BIOS and found that it doesn't recognise the SSD anymore. But after sometime, when I restarted it came back miraculously."

On the other hand, it could be a pure hardware fault. Or it may be nothing of substance. With millions of Windows users, you're going to have faults after a Windows Update purely on the basis of chance.

Actually, and again as I pointed out last week, such is the insufferable frequency of Windows Update you could scarcely hope to have a drive failure that didn't happen in fairly close proximity to a Windows patch.

I cautioned last week I'd personally be tempted to hold off on KB5063878, especially if you have any of the implicated drives on the list. I'd hold to that for now, but it's increasingly looking like this is at worst a fairly limited issue and not the widespread destroyer of SSDs that was first mooted.

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Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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