Windows 11 Update Kb5063878 Causing SSD Failures
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A heated debate is brewing around the Windows 11 update KB5063878, with many users claiming it's causing SSD failures. The discussion centers on whether the update is actually "killing" SSDs or just corrupting data, with some commenters arguing that both scenarios are dire, as valuable data is at stake. While some users, like toast0, have seen SSDs suddenly become unresponsive, others, like kimixa, report experiencing read-only failures with their Crucial drive, highlighting the complexity of the issue. As one commenter astutely put it, storing critical data without backups is a recipe for disaster, regardless of the SSD's fate.
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There is more chance of being able to fix data corruption, than being able to fix a bricked drive or one with unbearable blocks.
That said, people use words with a different meaning all the time, and data corruption could fit as a failure.
I got the data off, but most of the data wasn't really that important so there might have been dead regions.
I feel that many consumers won't really know if it's still readable, I'd suggest that 90% of people just have a single drive, and windows doesn't cope with a non-writable root drive particularly well.
There was a firmware bug, but updating the firmware was inconvenient, and the specific interaction that caused the failure wasn't stated, so I couldn't avoid whatever it was; seemed connected to being pretty idle... we had a second data center as an untested "warm" failover target, and disks would tend to die over there where nothing significant was happening.
I don't think the analogy is good. You might be better off replacing Linus with Apple and Linux with macOS. In that case, I would definitely think Apple should be held liable if an update to macOS bricks some hardware in a Mac.
But with Linux, it is different: You do not have a business relationship with Linus.
Sure, if you bought your Linux distribution from, say Red Hat, and it bricks your server, I think you might have a good case against Red Hat(IBM).
And why does the SSD allow this to happen? A SSD has its own onboard computer, it's not just allowing the OS to do whatever it wants. Obviously the OS can write way too much and reach the endurance limit but that should have been figured out almost instantly, with OS write stats and SMART stats.
That's also what I want to know. All the information on this topic seems to be just circular anecdotes like a snake eating its own tail: a bunch of anecdotal reddit posts, quoting a Tom's hardware article, that's quoting more anecdotal reddit posts, that's quoting one Japanese tweet of someone's speculation.
Like how many of these SSD deaths can actually be pinned on this update, and how much of this is just "Havana syndrome" of people's SSDs dying for whatever other reason, then they hear about this hubbub in the news and then they go on reddit and say "OMG mine too", then clickbait journalists pick up on it, and round and round we go, further reinforcing the FUD, but without any actual technical analysis to verify.
There is probably something going on. It could very well just be a bad batch of SSD controllers from one manufacturer failing.
If the device is DRAM-less, much of its central information (large parts of the FTL, in particular) resides in the host's RAM, where the OS could presumably touch it. If that area of RAM is _somehow_ being overwritten or out-of-sync or otherwise unreliable, you can get pretty bad corruption.
The FTL algorithm still needs one or more large tables. The driver allocates host-side memory for these tables, and the CPU on the SSD that runs the FTL has to reach out over the PCIe bus (e.g. using DMA operations) to write or read these tables.
It's an abomination that wouldn't exist in an ideal world, but in that same ideal world people wouldn't buy a crappy product because it's $5 cheaper.
Then again, I think dramless SSDs represent a large fraction of the consumer SSD market, so they'd probably be well-represented no matter what causes the issue.
Finally, I'll point out that there's a lot of nonsense about DRAMless SSDs on the internet - e.g. Google shows this snippet from r/hardware: "Top answer: DRAM on the drive benefits writes, not reads. Gaming is extremely read-heavy, and reads are..."
FTL stands for flash TRANSLATION layer - it needs to translate from a logical disk address to a real location on the flash chip, and every time you write a logical block that real location changes, because you can't overwrite data in flash. (you have to wait and then erase a huge group of blocks - i.e. garbage collection)
If you put the translation table in on-SSD DRAM, it's real fast, but gets huge for a modern SSD (1+GB per TB of SSD). If you put all of it on flash - well, that's one reason thumb drives are so slow. I believe most DRAM-full consumer SSDs nowadays keep their translation tables in flash, but use a bunch of DRAM to cache as much as they can, and use the rest of their DRAM for write buffering.
DRAMless controllers put those tables in host memory, although I'd bet they still treat it as a cache and put the full table in flash. I can't imagine them using it as a write buffer; instead I'm guessing when they DMA a block from the host, they buffer 512B or so on-chip to compute ECC, then send those chunks directly to the flash chips.
There's a lot of guesswork here - I don't have engineering-level access to SSD vendors, and it's been a decade since I've put a logic analyzer on an SSD and done any reverse-engineering; SSDs are far more complicated today. If anyone has some hard facts they can share, I'd appreciate it.
>but gets huge for a modern SSD (1+GB per TB of SSD)
except most drives allocate 64MB thru HMB. Do you know of any NVME drives that steal Gigabytes of ram? Afaik Windows limits HMB to ~200MB?
>Finally, I'll point out that there's a lot of nonsense about DRAMless SSDs on the internet
FTL doesnt need all that ram. Ram on drives _is_ used for caching writes, or more specifically reordering and grouping small writes to efficiently fill whole NAND pages preventing fragmentation that destroys endurance and write speed.
Surely that distinction would make one more vulnerable to corruption than the other?
Publications need clicks, videos need watches, people need upvotes
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5536733/...
edit: The author of the comment I replied to has changed their comment to remove all details of their testing.
For plenty of users, their only exposed attack surface is the web browser and AV codecs. Updates outside of that make no security difference for them.
Until they realize that every Microsoft app sends data to mothership.
Or if they were properly done. Example: Intel and the plundervolt vulnerability. To fix that they removed the ability for undervolting in ny laptop. If I don't use SGX there's no reason for the block. They could've restricted undervolting only when SGX is enabled but no, they had to "fix" it in the worst way possible.
This does not seems to be the case. Rounding buttons and changing icons size in Teams and Office 365 has nothing to do with security.
Can you point to some "security" updates ? /s
Anyway, security updates should be decoupled from feature updates, so that people aren't hesitant to update. Otherwise, you get people who hold out because they're worried the new release is going to break all their settings and "opt-in" into all kinds of new telemetry.
It shouldn't be that way though. Especially the billion dollar corporations should not be excused for shipping insecure software - the sad reality though is that Microsoft seems to have lost most of its QA team and what remains of its dev team gets shifted to developing adware for that sweet sweet "recurring revenue" nectar. Apple doesn't have that problem at least, but their management also has massive problems, prioritizing shiny new gadgets over fixing the tons of bugs people have.
I don't want to endorse Windows at all (use Linux if you can!). But maybe you need it to occasionally test something or whatever.
And after a whole day of debugging and hair pulling at work I just don't feel like then also debugging why a game is not running like it should.
But I heard I should give it a try again, last time I gave it a shot was 2-3 years ago. Big plus would be that I'd be completely free of Windows...
STANDARD - it's not and I hate people that pretend that they are. It's that easy.
I don't play multiplayer games so I'm not concerned by anti cheats though.
Yeah aggressive anticheat won’t work - but I don’t care much about multiplayer these days, and have consoles to play on if I really want.
Sorry but this drive is almost 15 years old.
Please don't buy "grey market" MS keys (i.e. super cheap keys or keys for products not sold to end users, like LTSC).
Either buy keys from legitimate vendors or use alternative activation methods (emulated KMS, etc.). I believe a lot of these grey market keys come either from MSDN subscriptions or leaked MAK keys, in either case, you aren't really paying for the product, you're just funneling money to sketchy people.
> https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
> the statements incompatible with local law are to be disregarded as void
This is to protect The beneficent of EULA terms (Microsoft) from the possibility that entire EULA is rendered illegal because one of its statements is illegal.
So EULA doesn't say
> no
What it says instead is
> no, if that's legal where you use this software
Though this condition doesn't neighbor the statement like this.
I had a BSOD last week, 0x0000012b (FAULTY_HARDWARE_CORRUPTED_PAGE), which I've never had, and was hoping it isn't related to this update.
https://serverfault.com/questions/1172216/issue-with-samsung...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-health-dro...
Then the drive is defective.
They want to stick with Windows because it's safe and just works.
I'm actually very surprised a single person managed to pull off a scam of this magnitude and am very worried about what effect fabricated news (now helped by AI) will have in the future.
https://youtu.be/TbFIUu_7LIc?si=o1p2FrDYFeLEtIoF
Youtube got bit by this randomly, just working, not looking for this issue.
And how does such a thing reserve host RAM?
[1] https://wccftech.com/phison-dismisses-reports-of-windows-11-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem
* https://youtube.com/watch?v=mlY2QjP_-9s (JayzTwoCents)
* https://youtube.com/watch?v=sU_WepeHUd8 (ThioJoe)
* https://youtube.com/watch?v=7xS-CE-hy6Q (Dave's Attic)
* https://youtube.com/watch?v=zoHGSz-f6os (Pureinfotech)
I’ve had repeatable data loss recently from windows 11 under a specific condition copying directories in explorer. The case works on windows 10 LTSC fine. I have absolutely no idea where to even raise this as an issue now. I’m not sure I even give a fuck.
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-latest-windows...
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