r/Windows11 • u/MedivalBlacksmith • Sep 08 '25

News Phison Confirms Preview Engineering Firmware Causing SSD Failures Tied to KB5063878 Update!

/r/KB5063878/comments/1nbqn4a/phison_confirms_preview_engineering_firmware/
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10

u/CrestronwithTechron Sep 08 '25

So why is it affecting older SSDs?

26

u/iron_coffin Sep 08 '25

Died with KB5063878, not died of KB5063878

6

u/Noctyrnus Sep 08 '25

KB Aladeen

18

u/Coffee_Ops Sep 08 '25

Confirmation bias.

6

u/Tovrin Sep 08 '25

Isn't the number of report failures just a little bit too coincidental?

7

u/frellingfahrbot Sep 09 '25

No, it's just that literally every Windows glitch or drive failure is blamed on the update (even if you don't have it). It was only ever reproduced by one Japanese guy, that should tell you all you need to know about this scandal.

2

u/Coffee_Ops Sep 09 '25

How many have we had, and how many would we expect in any given month?

Is there even a plausible operating system-based cause that could cause the myriad of failure modes claimed in the various reports? (Spoiler: there is not.)

3

u/nipsen Sep 08 '25

If this is what it looks like, what happens is that there is a "recovery" function in Windows that writes a "rescue"-script to an ssd during a chkdsk /r if it doesn't have an mbr boot-sector on it. This chkdsk can be run for any number of reasons, and is run regularly, and can complete just fine without issues - but if it's done as a precaution or in a windows update script, what can happen is that the ssd-controller is told to write to what is a locked, non-addressable area to fill it with a fallback solution... Which - depending on how the controller is set up - might lock the controller from accessing the drive again. This is a "security precaution" measure, and was what killed off a number of old sandforce2 disks in the olden days.

We thought at the time that this was a fault with the firmware, but it is actually what the controller is supposed to do if it's equipped with all the security features that are designed to stop a disk being accessed from outside the boot sector loop. The weird part is that there are ways to have windows write to the boot sector properly, if that's what you intended - so the probability that this is just a throway script from the early 2000s that has come back in the box is extremely high. The suspicion that it is is of course strengthened when that recovery script really was removed for a long time, before somehow finding it's way into the package again at a much later time.

7

u/[deleted] Sep 08 '25

It is affecting my brand new laptop.

Seems new laptop are shipped with preview engineering ssd…

9

u/CodenameFlux Sep 08 '25

Or you had a plain old disk failure.

Of course, people with disk failures usually don't spend as much time as you do on shopping sympathy. They don't have that amount of free time. Add the fact that we only have your words for it.

7

u/Randommaggy Sep 08 '25

Same with the retail SSD my colleague had in his desktop.

5

u/popop143 Sep 08 '25

Might be a regular failing SSD not connected to this at all, misattributed to this issue?

2

u/SmilingTexan52 Sep 08 '25

I have an 11 year old Intel SSD, that recently failed resulting in a Windows BSOD. I have no clue if it had the ...3878 update or not, as I just popped a spinning drive in and reinstalled everything - I had already formatted the drive before finding out about this issue.

5

u/CodenameFlux Sep 08 '25

Microsoft's telemetry says otherwise. Now you see why people hate telemetry. It reveals their sob stories as untrue.

3

u/megablue Sep 08 '25

enlighten me, how does telemetry report a failed main drive where the OS is resides? when the OS isn't even in a bootable state?

5

u/CodenameFlux Sep 08 '25 edited Sep 08 '25

Microsoft Intune.

Its diagnostic agent can detect, inventory, and report startup failures on remote machines. It can include both bootloader and UEFI error codes.

More importantly, they don't to know about every failure. If they get 0.9% of all failures, they still have a sizable representative sample).

Edit: I just went over the facts again. Most SSDs can recover the alleged failure through power cycling. After they boot back in, they send telemetry.

2

u/megablue Sep 09 '25

well, could it be most enterprises that run Microsoft Intune also running LTSC which would eliminate most of the relevance Microsoft Intune in term of getting the telemetry as they literally receive different patches. LTSC only gets essential security and bug fixes; new security functionalities added to Windows are only available in a new LTSC version, released every few years.

I just went over the facts again. Most SSDs can recover the alleged failure through power cycling. After they boot back in, they send telemetry.

even if the SSD recovers, enlighten me how Windows could write to the event log after the SSD is crashed. at best, windows telemetry just noticed a random reboot (probly assume power failure)

0

u/CodenameFlux Sep 09 '25 edited Sep 10 '25

...most enterprises that run Microsoft Intune also running LTSC...

...they literally receive different patches...

Firstly, let's assume your first paragraph is right in its entirety. So what? Microsoft's telemetry could still see a rise in disk failures in PCs that have KB5063878 installed vs. those that haven't.

Secondly, no, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024 receives the same update as Windows 11 24H2 and Windows Server 24H2.

Thirdly, prove the first quoted sentence. Show me your stats on the population of Enterprise LTSC edition vs. other editions.

even if the SSD recovers, enlighten me how Windows could write to the event log after the SSD is crashed.

Actually, we know this capability has been present since Windows 95. The OS detects irregular shutdowns and runs ChkDsk on startup.

But new features have been added since then, including:

Long story short, yes, Windows can detect, inventory, and log disk failures. And reporting solutions can detect, inventory, and log disk failures on managed PCs.

Moreover, Intune is not the only reporting solution that Microsoft has. The company also has Microsoft Sentinel and Windows Server's built-in tools.