There has been news in the latter half of August that Windows update KB5063878 has reportedly been killing SSDs, especially when performing continuous file writes exceeding 50GB on a drive that’s at least 60% full. However, after more than a week of investigation, Microsoft confirmed that the aforementioned update was not the cause of the issue. According to Redmond’s resolution to the service alert related to the original report, “After thorough investigation, Microsoft has found no connection between the August 2025 Windows security update and the types of hard drive failures reported on social media.”
One user claims that the bug affects how SSDs handle cache, and that models without DRAM and Phison NAND controllers are the most heavily affected. However, their further testing of 21 different SSDs revealed that drives using controllers from other brands seem to be affected as well. Nevertheless, the drives that crashed or disappeared were reportedly recovered after restarting the system, save for the Western Digital SA510 2TB model they tested.
