Following the recently discovered issue causing SSDs to fail or disappear from systems, brands have started scrambling to find out if their products are affected. Understandably, if a product isn’t prone to these problems, companies rush to reassure their customers that they are safe. Silicon Motion is one of these, whose SSD controllers are apparently immune to this issue.
In a statement to TechPowerUp, Silicon Motion has indicated that so far, none of its SSD controllers are affected by this bug. “Regarding the Windows 11 update issue: so far, none of the SMI controllers have experienced such a problem,” the company said. A boon for Silicon Motion, which is a direct competitor to Phison, whose controllers have been linked to this problem by multiple sources.
That said, Phison isn’t the only one reported to suffer from this bug, and most importantly, Silicon Motion didn’t categorically rule out the possibility of future discovery of affected products. The company is merely stating that so far, none of the vendors using its controllers have reported any issues. This is understandable since the cause will remain opaque until Microsoft and its partners locate its source.
For those unaware, a few days ago, X user @Necoru_cat and Japanese outlet NichePCGamer reported that Windows 11 ‘KB5063878’ and ‘KB5062660’ updates seem to break some SSDs. The problem was easily repeatable by subjecting a 60% filled drive to about 50GB of sustained write. Doing so rendered the SSD inaccessible and corrupted its SMART data. While some SSDs were safe, many observed similar failures, especially Phison-based ones. That said, we must keep in mind that Phison is a big player whose controllers are found inside heaps of drives.
If you are worried about being subject to this problem, you can always try to uninstall the ‘KB5063878’ and ‘KB5062660’ updates via Settings → Windows Update → Update history → Uninstall updates. If the option isn’t available, simply back up your files, preferably to a NAS or external drive. The most important part is to avoid large sequential writes to your SSD, so if you can’t back up your data, just freeze game updates and similar heavy loads. You will know you are affected if you see your drives vanish under heavy writes.
