r/hardware • u/imaginary_num6er • 2d ago

News Silicon Motion: None of Our Controllers Affected by the Windows 11 Bug

https://www.techpowerup.com/340170/silicon-motion-none-of-our-controllers-affected-by-the-windows-11-bug
111 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

42

u/imaginary_num6er 2d ago

In a statement to TechPowerUp, Silicon Motion says that thus far, none of its SSD controllers are affected by the Windows 11 update bug. "Regarding the Windows 11 update issue: so far, none of the SMI controllers have experienced such a problem," the company said. 

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u/0xdeadbeef64 2d ago

Silicon Motion says that thus far, none of its SSD controllers are affected

The "thus far" do leave a little wiggle-room, but hopefully they are right.

16

u/reddit_equals_censor 2d ago

well i mean at this point microsoft might just launch an "update" to just break a bunch more ssds for fun.

you know to make every major controller company suffer.

damn must it be terrifying to run windows at all still and "update" ever.

will it delete your files randomly? will it straight up brick your ssd? oh who knows, microsoft doesn't, because they don't test the os. they haven't done so for ages, when they fired most of their QA time some time after windows 7 :D

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u/DrMunro 2d ago edited 2d ago

It's not a Windows bug but a controller issue. Pre-24H2 Windows versions had artificial limits in place that happened to prevent problematic controllers to fail. 24H2 removed these limits so now all these design faults are exposed. Samsung and SMI both did their homework earlier and fixed their firmwares so they have no problems with 24H2. But now everyone else also has to fix their stuff. WD released firmware fixes in 2024/10 which also should prevent failure on those drives.

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u/Verite_Rendition 2d ago

But that was a bug that was addressed last year. The question is what changed in the August update to cause all hell to break loose?

14

u/Shadow647 2d ago

Pre-24H2 Windows versions had artificial limits in place that accidentally prevented crap controllers to die

Source?

27

u/DrMunro 2d ago

Before 24H2 Windows limited HMB drives to max 64 Mb allocation, 24H2 allows whatever amount the drives asks for, up to 200 Mb. WD drives asked for 200 but it made them unstable thus WD had to release new firmware for those drives after 24H2 in October. The previous 64 Mb limit in 23H2 prevented the controller failure.

0

u/Kyrond 2d ago

That is good to know. Is there a source for which drives has which controllers and which are affected?

-5

u/nicuramar 2d ago

You’re just making shit up. 

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u/Constellation16 2d ago edited 2d ago

Does anyone know what the actual issue is? Something to do with power management?

12

u/Verite_Rendition 2d ago

We're all in the dark, here. It's going to take some time to do a proper root cause analysis.

5

u/vegetable__lasagne 2d ago

Is there a list of what controllers seem affected? Is it only certain Phison ones?

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u/SyzygeticHarmony 2d ago

Only Phison controllers are affected? do we know more about the technical reason for the fault? The article is short on details

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u/mduell 2d ago

HMB size is no longer limited to 64Mb.

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u/Constellation16 2d ago

What you are talking about was a separate incident last year.

-11

u/shroudedwolf51 2d ago

Last I heard, Phison annouced that it's still being investigated and there's no definitive proof that it was just the controller at fault. It could just as likely be Windows 11's regurgitative "AI" code.

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u/jezevec93 2d ago

Is this helpful for consumers? Is it even possible to find out what controllers drives in PC has?

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u/FormerSlacker 2d ago

Unless it's some obscure model sure, look at the model number, go read reviews and you'll see it mentioned what controller it uses.

3

u/jezevec93 2d ago

I have WB blue SN580, I cant find info about controller other than "SanDisk Proprietary". Seeing many Sandisk drives were affected makes me worry. Last firmware update was a year ago because Windows 11 BSOD caused by em.

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u/tioga064 2d ago

Use techpowerup database, its pretty good for drive specs.

https://www.techpowerup.com/ssd-specs/western-digital-sn580-1-tb.d1541

Your drive have a wd proprietary controller, so far we dont know if windows is causing trouble on those one or what ones at all, excluding silicon motion 

5

u/Aleblanco1987 2d ago

a friend had both of his pcs affected

-35

u/comperr 2d ago

people with crappy SSDs outing themselves LOL. only the bottom tier SSD without SDRAM are affected

18

u/Jonny_H 2d ago

There's lots of use cases where "peak performance" isn't really needed, having a $$$ crazy fast SSD for bulk storage is just a waste, for example.

And that's before you get into the weird elitism.

4

u/Nuck_Chorris_Stache 2d ago

A lot of people would really like to replace their mechanical hard drives with large capacity SATA SSDs, but they still don't make them over 8TB.
Because even if they're only like 350MB/s sequential, they would still be significantly faster than a mechanical drive.

-15

u/comperr 2d ago

that's what 3.5" HDDs are for, bulk storage. Not going to argue about the crappy SSD, please buy one, and I will enjoy your pain as you endure its misery

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u/Jonny_H 2d ago

There's a whole load of reasons why a 3.5" mechanical drive wouldn't be appropriate either, be it size constraints, power, vibration, probably other things I can't think of right now. Or performance - even the lowest end DRAM-less SSDs have orders of magnitude better performance in many situations to comparable mechanical drives.

And so for the average gamer, as much of the performance in loading real games is realized at lower price points, why bother spending more? Conspicuous consumption? So you can brag about being above the plebs on reddit?

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u/Sopel97 2d ago edited 2d ago

only the bottom tier SSD without SDRAM are affected

reportedly not true

edit. got blocked lmao, where do these people come from

1

u/LLMprophet 2d ago

Would you know if Microsoft Surface Laptops (5 or higher) are affected?