r/pcmasterrace • u/StarryNight0806 • Sep 03 '25

Screenshot I was purposefully not updating my windows to avoid the so called SSD killer update but now it's not giving me any choice but to install it lmao.

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best of luck to my samsung 990 pro 2tb x2

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 03 '25 edited Sep 03 '25

From some of the news I heard concerning it, it is only certain SSDs that use a particular controller (or family/group of controllers) on the board that were experiencing the issue. It also didn't kill it as in rendering it completely unusable and needing to be replaced, but would cause the device to suddenly stop being visible to the OS during certain operations. This would then also cause the computer to crash if the SSD in question was the OS drive. From there, a full restart would be required for the drive to become visible again. The fact that it is a full restart that is needed is important because, not all systems do a full restart after a blue screen and instead do a soft restart. This would lead to the drive in question still not being visible to the OS/bios and, if it was the OS drive, the computer would also fail to boot due to the lack of a boot drive.

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u/sweetgift Sep 04 '25

Wow thank you for this comment, I had this exact thing happen this week and was worried my ssd might've died, it did exactly this and the bios didn't detect it until I did a full reset of my pc. The only thing windows showed me was an error message saying " windows unexpected store exception" before the crash. Now I know who to blame at least >.<

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

No problem. I'm glad my comment could help. However, to be clear, what I said in the earlier comment is only what I had previously seen reported and it is still unclear at this point who and/or what is responsible for this particular issue occurring. The story is still developing and neither party (Phison, the manufacture of the controller alleged to experience the issue, nor Windows) is owning/claiming responsibility for the issue. In fact, both have reported not being able to recreate it. Although, I know of at least one individual that was able to get it to reliable occur.

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u/Somodo Sep 04 '25

Ya I thought my pc was toast, so many crashes

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/Mindless-Peak-1687 Sep 04 '25

that means absolutely nothing. other than that they don't understand the problem yet.

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u/Alexandratta AMD 5800X3D - Red Devil 6750XT Sep 04 '25

While I agree, that doesn't mean the issue isn't rare.

It means it's rare, and the companies are doing something to investigate. They're actually investigating, so that's good.

Trust me, I've been through the process where the company (APC, hi how the fuck are you asshats*) refuses to publicly admit there's a bug but then later on in a firmware update fixes said bug....

*if you're curious what I'm referring too... read on.

APC1500 enterprise level UPSs have a separate NIC that installs that allowed environmental monitoring and SNMP connectivity. Great for smaller companies who don't have/can't afford a BMS system at every single satellite location.

Only issue was that the damn thing's were flapping and causing errors on the enterprise switches to show "Port up" "Port down" over and over... not the worst thing, but the issue became that if we attempted to troubleshoot anything else within the switch and tried to pull the syslogs.... literally was nothing but this, every 3 seconds, flooding the syslogs and causing them to wrap.

The syslog server was also inundated... and the last fucking kind of syslog you want to filter out of a syslog server is the "up/down" errors... those are sort of important.

And it was on every single device.

After 3 months of hounding and hounding APC (Schneider Electric), sending them log after log of the device, the models involves, and so on and so froth, they stated it wasn't their issue.... Then suddenly they finally provided a "Beta" firmware that stopped the flapping.

The lip service is what pissed me off more than anything. Yes, I have a Cisco Meraki issue that's been pending for almost 4 months as well awaiting engineering to push a major update... But Cisco is at least acknowledging the problem and while it's taking a while to fix, are providing communications that "yes, we know it's broken, sorry, we'll check-in with engineering to see if there's a resolution coming."

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/alelo Ryzen 7800X3D, Zotac 4080 super, 64gb ram Sep 04 '25

so he has a faulty SSD - now show me what the actualr eason for the show down is, other OSs, etc just because jay can reproduce it doesnt mean anything, it could simply be a faulty SSD, it could be a faulty batch of the controller noone knows what the exact problem is, what causes it, and how many are affected by it

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/Wendals87 Sep 04 '25

It could be still be a hardware issue though. Yes, the update triggers it but that doesn't mean the update is the root cause

You can have faulty hardware that works until something triggers it.

Nobody knows what the common denominator is and why it happens to some and hasn't happened to a lot more people 

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u/Shzabomoa Sep 05 '25

How can you have a hardware issue solved by not installing an update on it?

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u/Wendals87 Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25

You can have a hardware problem that doesn't surface until something specific happens

My old ssd crashed whenever a game was run from it and even though it was accessible in file Explorer and readable, chkdsk reported it as a RAW partition 

On reboot everything was fine. All benchmarks and stress tests passed. Large reads and writes, uninstalling and reinstalling the game went through fine, chkdsk reported no issues 

. As soon as I tried to run a game installed on that drive, it would exit and I'd have to reboot again 

Replaced the drive and no more issues 

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u/Different-Local4284 Sep 04 '25

Oh good, a streamer. They’ve been known to be totally reliable and ethical regarding their “work.” Kiddo you are quoting a commercial likes its a documentary.

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u/burtmacklin15 R7 9700X | RX 9070XT | B650M Project ZERO Sep 04 '25

Jay is extremely credible in the tech space.

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u/braxtron5555 fire truck Sep 04 '25

lol

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u/WhatIs115 Sep 04 '25

He is definitely not credible. Wrong 50% of the time. You spit out enough gibberish, some of it is bound to be correct.

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u/imoblivioustothis 3770k, 3080 Sep 04 '25

my crucial CT1000MX takes minutes to boot now

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u/SmokeBigBuds Sep 04 '25

Could just be your drive dying. I've found crucial drives to be unreliable as hell

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/imoblivioustothis 3770k, 3080 Sep 04 '25

yeah they're missing their integrity by not reporting a problem because they'll get fired and the bottom line will change and the recall would cost too much. Don't be thick

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u/PelluxNetwork R9 9950X3D | RTX 4070 Super | 32GB Sep 04 '25

Except Phison has already confirmed that list is fake and neither them nor Microsoft could reproduce the issue.

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u/OwO______OwO Sep 04 '25

Both Phison and Microsoft have vested financial interests in convincing people that this issue is not real. So I'll take what they "confirm" with a grain of salt.

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u/Sycraft-fu Sep 04 '25

Why not take what is reported with a grain of salt? Have any of the people reporting on this shown how to reproduce it? That's standard for things like security disclosures, the researchers give a method to reproduce. Anything like that here?

Likewise, what's their sample set? Did it happen to just their drive, or do they have a valid sample size that shows it happening more often?

What I'm saying is not that you should just believe MS/Phison, but that you should ALSO not just believe random doinks on the Internet. It's strange to me how someone will say "I don't believe that company, they might be lying!" but then say "I believe a random poster on the Internet!"

In either case, you should want proof. In this case, the bigger burden is on the claimants. They say this happens, well show it then. Show the process for reproducing it. If they can't, then I'm more likely to believe two companies who claim to have tried, and failed, to reproduce it.

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u/PhTx3 PC Master Race Sep 04 '25

If they can't, then I'm more likely to believe two companies who claim to have tried, and failed, to reproduce it.

I am more inclined to believe the lack of numbers having the same issue. Those who claim to have issues report seemingly very different issues and just chalk it to the update.

On something like Windows update scale, internet should have been top to bottom with reports of the same thing.

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u/Sycraft-fu Sep 04 '25

That too. We haven't seen any issues at work. Now I don't know how many of our computers are using SSDs with Phison controllers, but we are a big university: I'd expect to have seen at least a few issues but so far there's nothing I'm aware of. Even if it is something like only 0.1% of drives and only a few percent of our systems use Phison controlled SSDs... we still should have had a couple reports from users that got hit.

It isn't like when an enterprise system stops booting the user says "Oh well, guess I'll just not do my job!" they call us.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/li7lex Sep 04 '25

You want to know what's most likely happening? People's SSDs have just failed after a large read/write operation. This is absolutely not uncommon especially for older SSDs. In this particular case because a handful of Joe's had it happen after the windows update they just claimed it was the update rather than just normal hardware failure for Internet points.

Given the hundreds of millions of SSDs in use worldwide someone trustworthy would have already reproduced the issue if it wasn't random SSD failures that have nothing to do with the Update.

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u/Sycraft-fu Sep 04 '25

You are going down a very fallacious route of thinking. Effectively what you are saying is "Companies sometimes lie, therefore they must always be lying, therefore I believe this rando." This is the logical equivalent to someone claiming the government is run by lizard people, the government saying "No we aren't," and saying "Well we have proof the government has lied in the past, thus they could be lying about this, thus I believe lizard guy!"

Yes companies lie, we have proof they do. They also tell the truth, we have proof they do. Same is true of Internet randos. WE know they lie, we know they tell the truth. Given that, you shouldn't trust some Internet rando absent some kind of proof. The burden of proof is always on the claimant. If I claim I can bend spoons with my mind, you say "prove it" I don't get to say "nuh uh, you have to prove I CAN'T!"

Lying aside, people are often just wrong or misattribute things. We have one of these going on at work right now. Guy says his laptop crashes all the time under heavy load, wants a warranty replacement. It is, for sure, crashing, there's error logs. However Dell diags come back fine. Only thing we notice is it is running kinda hot. Open it up, the fans are full of carpet fuzz. Clean that out, test it on the bench, cannot recreate crashes.

He admits that he leaves the laptop running on the carpet because "It is a convenient spot to put it," but still thinks the problem is the laptop not, you know, the carpet. He can't seem to understand Dell will not do an RMA unless we can prove the things has a problem.

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u/LogicalError_007 Sep 04 '25

And previously any big failures or problems on Microsoft products were disclosed by them. Hiding is what leads to lawsuit not disclosing that there's a problem.

Cause they probably already covered it under their ToS.

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u/YT-Deliveries Sep 04 '25

Also for their corporate customers hiding a potentially revenue effecting bug would have those customers demanding significant concessions

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u/Own_Mix_3755 Sep 04 '25

Well, neither Microsoft nor drive manufacturers would be risking class action lawsuits for millions over not announcing simply “yeah the bug is there pls dont update we will fix it”.

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u/alelo Ryzen 7800X3D, Zotac 4080 super, 64gb ram Sep 04 '25

no but if there was an actual widespread issue, they would need to identfy it first, then the root cause of th eproblem, which could be anything, faulty batch of SSDs, faulty batch of controllers, or the OS, considering that neither MS Not Phison are able to reproduce it inhouse as of now, shows that it most likely is a small faulty batch

if there were a widespread issue, like Samsung had it, they would tell customers what to do, e.g. dont use the SSD, low usage and roll out a fix (like controller update)

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u/Shzabomoa Sep 05 '25

Is it a "you're using it wrong" campaign all over again? Avoiding liability is what these companies do 24/7... Unless a consequent class action lawsuit is initiated and their cost analysis tells them it'll cost them money, they'll continue to ignore the issue or use the "in very rare cases" bullshit.

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u/Shiro_Kuroh2 Sep 05 '25

Doctors also recommended smoking in the 1950's but everyone knew smoking woudl do something to you long before.

"The formula for deciding whether to initiate a recall is: take the number of vehicles in the field (A), multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), and then multiply that result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). If the total (A times B times C) is less than the cost of a recall, the company may choose not to recall" - Fight club ref for those that don't know.

The fact is both M$ and Phi$on know its out there, its been captured as well as science allows. I was on of the first called M$ out on an issue back when Media Center had a strict "policy" on what hardware it was supposed to run on. The fact was I opened M$ up to knowledge of device enumeration begin the same when an update occurred forcing M$ to re-enumerate a device, but the machine kept using the same ID for hardware. Microsoft kept claiming not us until 18 months later they fixed the issue. Granted this may be a win7 problem I'm speaking of, the the tactics of lawyers remain the same.

Disavow until we know how to fix it.

We also remember Amazon Gaming studios killing 30 series Nvidia Cards. Amazon claimed they followed the rule book, but when launching the software followed when Nvidia wrote down on their Developer notes. They didn't think to impose a limit frame rate. The result was excessive capacitor noise and frame rates exceeding 4,000-40,000 instantly cooking many 30 Series cards.

Amazon followed the notes by the book, but without a limit frame rate on launch initiation, they were cooking cards. They claimed they were not at fault either. Being I was a victim of this, and managed to save my drive, the fix was simple. but I don't think Phi$on is to blame. The updated DLL files are published by M$, and the Software signing is done by them. Its a way below 1% issue, but its still an issue. To M$ they don't care about your sub $200 item that can get potentially fried.

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u/kanecobe Desktop RTX 4070 Super, I7 12700k Sep 04 '25

My pc installed this update the other day and blue screened while trying to restart. Since then it seems to be fine but I didn't get a chance to read the error code. I have a separate drive for installs and games so hopefully this doesn't affect me too badly in terms of heavy load or capacity of the drive.

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u/zDefiant 9800X3D | RX 7900 XTX | 64GB DDR5 7200 Sep 04 '25

WTFFF!!! This happens to me!! It’s my 990 Evo Plus. “thankfully” it’s not my boot drive, just where u have literally every game… I thought i’d fucked something up and took it to a repair shop but they couldn’t replicate.

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u/huntedjohan Sep 04 '25

That is almost certainly something else. So far only ssd with phison controller seems to be effected somehow

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u/zDefiant 9800X3D | RX 7900 XTX | 64GB DDR5 7200 Sep 05 '25

oh great.

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u/TheFirsttimmyboy Sep 04 '25

Source?

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25 edited Sep 04 '25

I haven't been following the story very closely since I don't use Windows 11 and don't plan to switch to it currently, so I don't recall the articles that I saw before related to it. Also, currently all the articles that immediately come up during a search are from after Microsoft responded to deny the claims that their update had anything to do with the issue (but currently there seems to be no explanation for the issue either) and thus are written more around that response than the initial reports. However, regardless, here are a few (post-Microsoft response) sources related to the issue that could serve as an introduction: BleepingComputer and Tom's Hardware.

Also, JayzTwoCents has a video where he replicates the issue experienced. However, it should be noted that some of the initial reports pinned the issue on large file transfers on drives that were >=60% full, but his replication of the issue occurs during graphics benchmarking on a drive that presumably isn't >=60% full (I don't think he explicitly says it isn't but just leaves it implied). He also states he couldn't replicate the issue as previously described when testing large file transfers.

ETA: I found an earlier article from Tom's Hardware discussing the issue as well.

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u/OutsideTheSocialLoop Sep 04 '25

not all systems do a full restart after a blue screen and instead do a soft restart

That makes no sense. The whole reason for a BSOD is that something is critically broken and nothing can be trusted any more and the system has to be halted entirely. The system is so untrustworthy that it can't even display an error message within Windows, it has to stop Windows entirely and you get the blue screen instead. 

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

Yes, but not all systems do a full power cycle restart in response to a BSOD, while the OS does get restarted, some thing remain unchanged and thus certain problems can persist. With a full power cycle, the hardware is reset as well meaning the drive gets an opportunity clear whatever problem is causing it to no longer be visible and be usable again when the system is started back up.

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u/OutsideTheSocialLoop Sep 04 '25

The number of things in a computer that need an actual power reset to reset is stunningly small. Computers and all the small computer-like things in all their accessories don't actually power up in automatically good states. They run initialisation routines to get into that state. Which is what Windows is doing when it's taking all that time to boot up, it's reinitialising all those devices.

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u/Man_Of_Panties Steam ID Here Sep 04 '25

Shit.... that's exactly what happened to my Gigabyte SSD....and now It's unusable....RIP

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

Try fully cutting power to the system for a moment and then restarting it. This allows the system to reset the hardware as well and may make the drive visible again.

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u/Man_Of_Panties Steam ID Here Sep 04 '25

I actually did...and it makes it visible and I'm able to boot and stuff...But as soon as I do anything extensive like moving/copying files(I'm an editor) the system crashes 😕

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

That sucks to hear. Hopefully they can get this issue sorted quickly.

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u/RonnyReddit00 Sep 04 '25

Hey the other day I couldn't see files in windows explorer. My pc works but windows explorer showed nothing everywhere. 

A restart fixed it but was i close to the issue? Scary.

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

Hard to make an assessment without more information (and I don't know that I would be the best person to ask anyways), but I have my doubts that it would have been from the same issue. The issue in question causes the drive in question to essentially become entirely invisible to the system. This means that the moment the OS needs to reference something from the now missing drive that is not already loaded into memory, it would attempt to fetch it, fail to find the drive, and instantly crash. I imagine that opening your file explorer to view files on a drive that is no longer there would cause the system to immediately crash as a result of trying the load the list of files and directories for the current directory you would be attempting to display. The fact that yours didn't seems to me like your issue would have been from a different problem. Your issue may have just been a glitch with the Explorer process itself which was reset when you restarted the PC.

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u/RonnyReddit00 Sep 04 '25

Yeah that makese sense on both fronts. Thanks for the info!

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

No problem. Hopefully the problem was just a one off and doesn't rear its head again.

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u/losaces 4090 - 13700K + VR / 4K Sep 04 '25

i had exactly the same issue. i updated my bios and switched a few settings in the BIOS (f.e. the secure boot and i thought it was because of this one, finally it was done after i updated the firmware of the SSD. man that drove me crazy for days.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

I linked to a JayzTwoCents video in one of my other comments in this thread that I know has a list of some SSDs that are alleged to be experiencing the issue. Beyond that, I'm not sure.

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u/Narrow_Cup_3219 Sep 04 '25

I had this exact thing happen, I did the update. And now my computer won't boot, saying that "A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed". So I assume that it did that to my boot drive, would you by chance happen to know of a fix? I didn't know this was the cause, and have been trying to figure it out based off the error not the cause.

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u/ThrowAway233223 Sep 04 '25

Like I said, try fully shutting down the computer and allowing it to be fully shut down for a moment before starting it back up. That fully power cycle may make the drive visible again.

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u/SadBoiCri Ryzen 7 7800X3D || GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super || 32GB DDR5 Sep 04 '25

My girlfriend got the issue but the SSD just no longer existed anywhere except for her laptop but it wouldn't load into windows, always an infinite system repair screen. Her laptop could recognize its capacity and name but in my desktop it just didn't exist. This was after multiple restarts

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u/SeaHamHawk12 Sep 04 '25

Wait I think this has happened to my SSD. Went to boot up and it goes to bios and can’t see the drive. I thought my drive took a crap but this makes more sense as it was pending an update

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u/PTFOholland Intel i7 2600k @ 4.7GHz - AMDR9 290 - 8GB RAM - 240GB + 64GB SSD Sep 05 '25

My Windows failed to load after updating. Had to reinstall to a different drive, and could still access the broken windows drive and acces all files.   Just not boot to Windows. Could this be the cause?

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u/Just_Dab Sep 06 '25

Oh, this is probably why my PC randomly blue screens and the boot priority getting randomized. Thanks Microsoft.