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Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

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Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#101
post #99

Is it actually killing the SSD (SSD can no longer be used) or just corrupting the data on the SSD? It's hard to make out from all the comments and news articles.

I've seen lots of SSDs die suddenly (no longer visible on the bus), so I would assume that is what is happening based on the words people are using. I've yet to see an SSD fail to read only mode like they're supposed to... and there's rarely any warning, just working or dead (although I did have a couple that went from working to terribly slow while doing a large reallocation, and we replaced those rather than find o…

Failing to read-only is only an Intel thing, I've not seen any other SSD do that...

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#102
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, some SSDs use host memory buffer (HMB) to cache FTL tables. If the FTL cache gets corrupted, and that causes critical data to be overwritten, that could brick the SSD. For instance, if the FTL table was corrupted in such a way where a page for a random file is mapped to the page for the SSD's FTL (or other critical data), and the OS/user tries to write to that random file.

Isn't that a huge flaw?

Yes, which is why they're cheap(er). It's better than the alternative of using flash instead of going out to system RAM, but DRAM-less SSDs are still the cheap option; HMB is a mitigation, and not a complete fix.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, the FTL is still in the SSD unless it's a host-managed SSD which is also operating in host-managed mode, which none of the articles have mentioned to be related to the issue

The FTL executes on the SSD controller, which (on a DRAM-less controller) has limited on-chip SRAM and no DRAM. In contrast, a controller for more expensive SSDs which will require an external on-SSD DRAM chip of 1+GB. 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 D…

One of the Japanese sites has a list of SSDs that people have observed the problem on - most of them seem to be dramless, especially if "Phison PS5012-E12" is an error. (PS5012-E12S is the dramless version)

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.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#104
I have a strong suspicion this was some kind of stock / market attack. Phison dropped 14% (and their main competitor Silicon Motion increased 7% incidentally), while every single "news / slop" points to a single original source, some random Japanese person called "necoru_cat" that posted a supposed list of affected models (full of spelling mistakes).

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.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FTL executes on the SSD controller, which (on a DRAM-less controller) has limited on-chip SRAM and no DRAM. In contrast, a controller for more expensive SSDs which will require an external on-SSD DRAM chip of 1+GB. 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 D…

One of the Japanese sites has a list of SSDs that people have observed the problem on - most of them seem to be dramless, especially if "Phison PS5012-E12" is an error. (PS5012-E12S is the dramless version) 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 nonsen…

I dont buy this. There are plenty of dramless SATA SSDs which should be impossible if your description was correct, not to mention DRAMless drives working just fine inside USB-NVME enclosures.

>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.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#106
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen lots of SSDs die suddenly (no longer visible on the bus), so I would assume that is what is happening based on the words people are using. I've yet to see an SSD fail to read only mode like they're supposed to... and there's rarely any warning, just working or dead (although I did have a couple that went from working to terribly slow while doing a large reallocation, and we replaced those rather than find o…

Failing to read-only is only an Intel thing, I've not seen any other SSD do that...

I've not seen an Intel SSD do it either, although I've seen many of them escape their earthly existence :P

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.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#107
post #39
post #19

If it breaks a SSD, would microsoft be liable for the damage?

The EULA that nobody reads says no

I think you also didn't read the EULA. The EULA says something along the lines:

> 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.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#108
post #76

Not related, but this reminds me of a recent issue with the Samsung 990 Pro SSD that required a firmware update for fix, and some drives had to be returned. I speculate it was exacerbated by increased usage. https://serverfault.com/questions/1172216/issue-with-samsung... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-health-dro...

> I speculate it was exacerbated by increased usage.

Then the drive is defective.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#109
post #16

That's why I don't install updates, unless and until they've been proven not to break things. I miss the old days when software was expected to work out of the box and updates, on the rare occasions when they appeared, were actually useful.

I hope you are speaking with tongue in cheek. Security is the main reason to keep current with updates. They address various “CVE” reports and go beyond to patch things not reported by CVEs.

> Security is the main reason to keep current with updates. They address various “CVE” reports and go beyond to patch things not reported by CVEs.

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.

Re: Windows 11 Update KB5063878 Causing SSD Failures

#110
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you are speaking with tongue in cheek. Security is the main reason to keep current with updates. They address various “CVE” reports and go beyond to patch things not reported by CVEs.

> Security is the main reason to keep current with updates. 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.

> For plenty of users, their only exposed attack surface is the web browser

Until they realize that every Microsoft app sends data to mothership.

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