September 7， News from Kuaikeji: The SSD failure issue that arose from the Windows 11 KB5063878 update has finally been resolved. The root cause has been identified as the use of engineering-grade firmware.
Recently， several users reported that after installing this update， their SSDs experienced problems such as disappearing from Windows or even data corruption when processing large amounts of data.
Following user reports， Phison， a major controller manufacturer， announced an investigation and released their findings approximately a week and a half later. Their report stated that after an accumulated 4500 hours of testing， they were unable to reproduce the issue.
Microsoft also commented that， after their own investigation， they similarly found no direct link between the August update and SSD failures.
However， a portion of users did indeed encounter similar problems. In response， PCDIY!， a Taiwanese technology publication， conducted a stress test involving a 100GB large file transfer.
They tested three solid-state drives featuring Phison PS5016-E16-32 and PS5026-E26-52 controller chips. During these tests， the SSD ‘disk drop’ and system crashes were successfully replicated.
Upon learning of PCDIY!’s test results， Phison expressed curiosity about the issue and decided to bring the samples back to their laboratory for further investigation.
Ultimately， Phison engineers discovered that the SSDs experiencing the problems were all using engineering-grade firmware， not the official retail version. When identical models of SSDs were tested with official firmware， the issues could not be reproduced.
This discovery elegantly explains why Phison and Microsoft might not have encountered the problem in their initial tests. It’s highly probable that their testing was conducted on standard retail products. Therefore， users who have purchased SSDs through legitimate retail channels have no cause for concern regarding this specific issue.
