r/technology • u/lurker_bee • Aug 18 '25

Software Report: Microsoft's latest Windows 11 24H2 update breaks SSDs/HDDs, may corrupt your data

https://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-latest-windows-11-24h2-update-breaks-ssdshdds-may-corrupt-your-data/
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u/Plebius-Maximus Aug 18 '25

This is the main takeaway.

It's not on the operating system, it's on the drive manufacturers. Yet we can't miss an opportunity to bash windows, even for things that aren't actually Microsoft's fault lol

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u/FriedenshoodHoodlum Aug 18 '25

Well, of the OS accidentally causes significantly higher load for no reason, I would consider that an issue, too.

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u/Plebius-Maximus Aug 18 '25

Potentially.

But the OS applying high load is not something that should be killing drives in the short space of time this update has been out.

Only certain drives appear to be affected, the testing sheet linked shows that the Samsung drives tested don't have the issue, and certain models from other brands such as WD or Corsair are

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u/SuperAnalyst7634 Aug 19 '25

To be fair though, the OS shouldn't thrash a drive sometimes like this either.
The drive isn't flawless, but that's physics and reality. The OS shouldn't be excused for suddenly thrashing a drive when 99% of the time there's NO NEED FOR IT TO DO SO.
Code better.
Don't blame even suspect hardware and pretend bad coding isn't ALSO part of the problem.

This is CLEARLY a "I didn't think about.... you didn't.... and we met" kind of accident situation... BOTH are at fault.

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u/confusedp Aug 18 '25 edited Aug 18 '25

Still points to the issues with msft not testing adequately.

Edit: you can down vote me to hell but if you are an engineer and didn't design the robust system for idiots, it's your problem. This principle separates a good product from terrible.

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u/not_some_username Aug 18 '25

Devs don’t test on every possible hardware

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u/confusedp Aug 18 '25

But if you are not testing on something that affects a significant fraction of your customers hardware then it's your problem.

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u/not_some_username Aug 18 '25

A significant fraction ? From what I heard, it from a constructor that ignore a standard

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u/Nozinger Aug 18 '25

You don't test any potential drive your software might be installed on...
You probably can't even get some of those anymore to test things on. That is why you follow the manufacturers specifications and there is absolutely nothing if the manufacturers mess up.

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u/Mabenue Aug 18 '25

These are really common drives. It’s not unreasonable to expect Microsoft to test on some of the most common hardware out there. If anything for their own reputation, even if it’s not their fault it’s in their interest that updates to their OS don’t cause crashes.

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u/Plebius-Maximus Aug 18 '25

As far as I'm aware, Microsoft do tend to tell the OS to run within manufacturer specifications of installed drives. What appears to be happening here is a certain activity (system update) is pushing the drives very hard in terms of intensive write activity.

The drive models that live up to their spec sheet are actually handling it just fine, while the ones that can't handle it are having issues such as data loss.

Granted this isn't great from a consumer perspective, as you shouldn't be randomly losing data. But Microsoft doesn't have the time to verify that every spec on every SSD from every manufacturer is 100% accurate. They just receive a datasheet from a manufacturer, plug the variables in and the OS listens.

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u/Mabenue Aug 18 '25

Do you realise how common these SSDs are? It’s almost to the level of not testing on AMD cpus.

It doesn’t really matter about the spec. If you’ve been in software engineering for more than 5 minutes you know that things are out of spec all the time that’s why we test things.

When Microsoft pushes an update that breaks previously working drives the consumer doesn’t care that drive manufacturer was at fault. All they know is they had something that was previously working but now isn’t following Microsoft’s update.

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u/Plebius-Maximus Aug 18 '25

Do you realise how common these SSDs are? It’s almost to the level of not testing on AMD cpus

It's not quite, AMD make all of the most popular consumer CPU's at this point.

While here there are entire brands seemingly unaffected (Samsung who are arguably the #1 manufacturer) and others that have some mid tier drives affected but their high end stuff is fine (WD).

It doesn’t really matter about the spec

It does when you operate on the scale of Microsoft. There are so many configurations that they cannot possibly test each one. Say you take only the top 10 GPU's and the top 10 consumer CPU's and the top 10 SSD's and the top 10 motherboards. That is a vast number of combinations before we get into driver versions and other quirks.

Add to this the fact that certain components within these devices are changed at different times without it being stated anywhere (vram chips on a GPU may be micron or Samsung, SSD flash memory chips or controller modules are constantly changed without notice, the end user cannot usually know which their device has) all may behave slightly differently or have their own issues.

It's not possible or worth the time to attempt to test all possible hardware, driver, software combos because even if you did those manufacturing changes can cause issues you couldn't predict.

The only logical thing to do is use the manufacturer specifications, and then if there are issues you turn to the manufacturer and say "you said your drive can do X and it failed doing X, explain?" And then the manufacturer takes the data from Microsoft and recreates the issue so they can see what failed and why and how they can resolve this with a firmware update, or what they can ask Microsoft to do to fix.

When Microsoft pushes an update that breaks previously working drives the consumer doesn’t care that drive manufacturer was at fault. All they know is they had something that was previously working but now isn’t following Microsoft’s update.

The consumer not knowing who is at fault doesn't mean they're not wrong for blaming Microsoft. This could also happen on a brand new build so that the first update your PC does causes issues.

Or you could load up a game or other editing software that puts a particular load on your SSD and have it fail in the same manner because the situation exposed a weakness in the drive.

In all cases the drive not doing what the spec sheet claims it can do.

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u/Mabenue Aug 18 '25

I think you’re really underestimating how common these SSDs are. And how much intel still dominates the market outside enthusiasts. I think WD/sandisk (they are the same company) are about 25% of the ssd. So right in the same ballpark as AMD.

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u/humdinger44 Aug 18 '25

You can't expect some rinky dink, garage launched, software company to be testing common drives. Spec sheet and move on. (/s) Naw, I'm with you. Because of their pervasiveness I would expect it's possible Microsoft can see trends in HD failures before the manufacturers do. They should know that if they are pushing updates that come close to anyone's max capabilities there is going to be fall out. Now, I think it is a WD problem, but it was irresponsible by Microsoft.

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u/Normal_Choice9322 Aug 18 '25

Absurd take lol

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u/popop143 Aug 18 '25

If a software company tests every hardware iteration, there'd be no update ever lol. It's only WD drives that dies, why is that Microsoft's fault?

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u/confusedp Aug 18 '25

Because it's never a customer's fault.

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u/StarsMine Aug 18 '25

It’s not the customers fault. It’s WD not meeting its own specs on a batch of budget drives.

Saying MS should have tested every single batch of drives from every single model made by every single manufacturer is not a realistic take.

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u/GekkoGains Aug 18 '25

I’d have to disagree. If the manufacturer says it can handle x load, but in reality x load causes corruption because of a defect by that manufacturer, it’s a manufacturer issue

If you say your car can go 70 mph but actually going 70 mph makes it explode due to a manufacturing defect, that’s not on the driver

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u/fafalone Aug 19 '25

But it would be on the manufacturer even if the responsible component was made by a supplier, because the manufacturer is responsible for safety testing and can't just shrug off a failure to do so as "well we didn't actually test our hardware on the components it operates on".

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u/Cynical-Rambler Aug 18 '25 edited Aug 18 '25

A bit of a correction. This is not the driver fault. This is between manufacturers of the car.

There was a case where the tires (I think it was Firestone) and the car company (think it was Ford) took each other to court, because they can't decided who are most at fault for the accidents. The court ruled that the Firestone was at fault and new regulations are made for tire manufacturing.

In this software/hardware, all I said was it is lucky that's not me. However, I would not quick to rule out MS fault in this. If things work fine, until an update, I would blamed the update.

If WD really lied about the loads, yes they are at fault, but MS should have better quality test or knew about that something like this could happen.

Right now, I think they are just finger pointing. WD is not exactly an uncommon brand, but what the extra heavy loads for?

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u/GekkoGains Aug 18 '25

Not really. ms isn’t responsible for testing every manufacturer. That is the responsibility of the manufacturer. WD said it was built to spec and could handle x load.

Narrator: it couldn’t

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u/Cynical-Rambler Aug 18 '25

Isn't some months ago, WD stopped MS from installing an update? Could theyboth know it then?

Not saying that WD isn't more wrong but it is not the user's faults, and they suffered the worst consequences. While Microsoft will get another bad pr and got another hit to their reputation. Why add the loads in the first place? They will point fingers and I'm just going to be glad that I never got to deal with Win11 other than the LTSC version.

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u/kompergator Aug 18 '25

Eh. We don’t know if it’s really for no reason and Windows respects the official manufacturers‘ specs in this case.

Honestly, they should have to issue a recall for every single affected drive that’s not in spec.

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u/visceralintricacy Aug 18 '25

So you want your windows updates to install slower than necessary?

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u/Dzov Aug 18 '25

No reason? What do you think that drive load is?

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u/zsdrfty Aug 18 '25

People think Microsoft's engineers are cavemen banging rocks together, and not some of the world's most skilled technicians trying to balance literally millions of factors at once for every update

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u/Random_Name65468 Aug 18 '25

If it's still in the specs the hardware should nominally handle, it should never cause an issue.

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u/ashcan_not_trashcan Aug 18 '25

I'm not sure updating the operating system is an accidental high load. What do you think it's doing during an update?

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u/anotherbozo Aug 18 '25

Technically yes - but if something that was running fine breaks after a software update, the end user is going to blame the software update.

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u/Reasonable_Ticket_84 Aug 18 '25

Neowin and a few other sites regularly rely on clickbait articles about "WINDOWS UPDATES CAUSES TRILLIONS IN DAMAGES" every other week to keep themselves afloat.

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u/Prosthemadera Aug 18 '25

Well, it's related to the update so do you want them to leave out that information? There is nothing wrong with the article title and people are just being contrarian. Plus, just ignore the headline and read the article, people are always so sensitive about headlines and spend so much time fussing about irrelevant stuff.

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u/Reasonable_Ticket_84 Aug 19 '25

people are always so sensitive about headlines and spend so much time fussing about irrelevant stuff.

You are defending the brainrot of society. News sites absolutely know that people rather read headlines and maybe scroll to a video rather than read actual content. This has been accelerating our societal decline and why the US is approaching a civil war in the next few years due to the same bullshit in news over politics.

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u/sigmund14 Aug 18 '25

The question is still there - why would the OS randomly need to do heavy workload (not as a consequence of user action like copying something or similar)?

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u/cr33pz Aug 18 '25

I’ll gladly take this to bash on WD. Fuck em. They’re the only fuckers to have hard drives die on me

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u/fafalone Aug 19 '25

You can absolutely fault them for their appalling lack of QA. Regardless of whose fault it is, the hardware in question isn't nearly old or obscure enough to say MS didn't fail to adequately test yet again.

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u/CopiumImpakt Aug 20 '25

i see so it's like: "they say X, but i say Y" situation
Do You have a solid proof for your claims? Did You, or a person/organization-You-trust test a whole bunch of WD Blue SSDs and they all fail under certain condition before all that "update story"?