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The baffling Windows 11 update bug that corrupted SSDs now appears to be linked to storage drives running pre-release firmware.
Memory component supplier Phison says that "engineering preview firmware" appears to be the culprit after a PC building group in Taiwan figured it out.
Last month’s Windows 11 24H2 update, KB5063878, has been spooking the PC community due to anecdotal reports that it can cause an SSD to abruptly vanish from the PC or trigger the OS to freeze and crash. Strangely, though, both Phison and Microsoft failed to replicate the error.
A do-it-yourself PC building group in Taiwan was also flummoxed after encountering the problem on several of their own SSDs, including a Corsair Force Series MP600 SSD 2TB and a Silicon Power US70 SSD 2TB. But upon closer inspection, the group discovered all their affected SSDs “had been shipped with engineering firmware, not the finalized version,” the group wrote in a Facebook post.
On Monday, Phison confirmed that the affected SSDs, including the Corsair product, were “utilizing an engineering preview firmware, which is not the final firmware used. Phison also replicated the PCDIY! tests on-site with the same SSD models and the same stress tests (100GB/1TB writes) utilizing consumer-available SSDs and found no failures or crashes."
Phison initially didn't say why the other SSDs were running pre-release software. As a result, there's been speculation that some vendors shipped their SSDs without updating their firmware. But Phison has since indicated to PCMag that problem was predominately popping up in Japan because media outlets there were receiving Corsair MP600 SSDs containing the pre-released firmware as part of a review process.
"It appears PCDIY!, a review site in Japan, flagged a potential issue when seemingly everyone started testing. Then they reported on it online. We (in Taiwan) investigated and uncovered that they tested a Corsair MP600 that was sent to the media as part of the AMD X570 chipset release," Phison said.
"The NDA on those articles was July 7th, 2019. All of the drives that shipped out to media through AMD shipped on preproduction firmware and all of those drives can be updated via the Corsair Toolbox software," the company added. "That reviewer (in Japan) never updated the drive from the preproduction firmware that was built in 2019. This firmware was never given to the general public and never shipped to end users outside of the media AMD shipped drives to."
We’ve contacted Corsair and will update the story if we hear back. In the meantime, the company has a tool to update the firmware on its SSDs. We've also asked Phison to clarify which review site it's referring to in Japan since we haven't seen such a PCDIY! site.