Recent Microsoft Windows updates may cause users' hard drives to malfunction, sparking significant discussion in the tech community.

In response to these concerns, Phison provided a statement acknowledging the industry-wide impact of Windows 11 updates KB5063878 and KB5062660. These updates potentially affected multiple storage devices, including certain storage devices supported by Phison.

"We understand the disruption this may cause and have quickly engaged with relevant industry stakeholders. We remain firmly committed to product integrity and the success of our partners and end users," Phison stated.

The company indicated it will review potentially affected controllers and collaborate with partners to continue providing updates and recommendations for affected partners, ensuring support and implementation of any applicable remedial measures.

The problematic updates include Windows 10 (KB5063709 / KB5063877 / KB5063871 / KB5063889) and Windows 11 (KB5063878, KB5063875).

A Japanese user first reported that after installing Windows 11 24H2 update KB5063878, they encountered failure while updating the game "Cyberpunk 2077," with the hard drive partition containing the game disappearing entirely.

While the partition might recover after a restart, attempting to continue the update causes the problem to recur. Additionally, SMART information becomes unreadable, and the drive cannot be detected in BIOS.

Further testing revealed that if a hard drive continuously writes more than 50GB of data with SSD controller usage exceeding 60%, the drive may disconnect. SSDs using HMB without independent cache require even less write volume to trigger the issue, with some HDDs experiencing similar problems.

User feedback indicates the problems are primarily concentrated on SSDs using Phison controllers, particularly those without DRAM cache, which are most severely affected.