back to article Western Digital releases firmware fix for SSDs blighted by Windows 11 24H2 BSODs

Microsoft says it is looking into reports that certain Western Digital SSDs are causing trouble for users of Windows 11 24H2 on some devices. The problem was first noted by WindowsLatest.com, and a lengthy thread in the Western Digital forums documents the attempts users have made to deal with it. A Microsoft spokesperson …

  1. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    Anyone still buying WD?

    They sold hard drives for something like two years with a firmware bug that powers down the drive after 2 seconds of inactivity. I got concerned that maybe quality is #1 only because they got the units for the ranking very wrong.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Anyone still buying WD?

      WD makes some snazzy SSD's, like the 4TB SN850 (WDS400T2X0E).

      https://www.amazon.com/WD_BLACK-SN850X-Internal-Gaming-Solid/dp/B0B7CQ2CHH/

    2. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Anyone still buying WD?

      Yes.

      WD Red (CMR editions like Plus and Pro) are amazing. I have more than 10 in my house - 4 in an active NAS, 4 in a backup NAS (mostly the older 3Tb ones rolled down from the active NAS) and randoms that are too small for my usage (e.g. 1Tb) but I keep for if I ever need a hard drive.

      WD Gold just keep going - I have a box of them that are 10+ years old still spinning after years of server storage cluster usage.

      WD Black NVMe's are incredible (I have two in my only home device - a gaming laptop - and just upgraded one of them and sold the previous still with 99% life after 4 years of very heavy usage - almost 24/7, high-end gaming, VR, video-editing, programming, etc. etc. etc.).

      I will always go to WD first, but I will research what I'm buying (e.g. I don't want WD Red SMR devices).

      My Steam Deck is waiting for an upgrade (I bought the 64Gb model) and I've waited for the 2230-sized WD Black drives to come down in price. Maybe for Christmas.

      Every manufacturer on the planet has problem models (Seagate have a particularly bad reputation with me, for example, after EVERY ONE of their drives across an entire site failed catastrophically and without SMART warning within 4 years, including high-end server drives).

      But WD... I have managed thousands of WD Blues way past their expected lifetime and they were absolutely fine. Hundreds of WD Reds. Dozens of Golds. Dozens of Purples. And a handful of Blacks and NVMe's.

      And the numbers (which I have run) spoke for themselves. WD would always be my first choice.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Anyone still buying WD?

        I stupidly bought a WD green, and was disappointed with it's life span despite it not being heavily used.

        I'd still buy blacks and reds though.

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Anyone still buying WD?

          I used WD greens in my server. Naively, I didn't research them properly (they were cheap!) and discovered that they power down frequently. Not good in a FreeBSD/ZFS server. I found there was a firmware update that "fixed" the issue, allowing me to fully disable the auto-power down feature. They're still running many years later, albeit now in the backup for the server.

          I didn't buy WD green again, but at least in that instance there was a workaround that didn't involve writing a keep-alive script to access the drive array to stop the sleep mode.

          1. train_wreck

            Re: Anyone still buying WD?

            On Linux i’ve always used hd/sdparm to disable drive standby, and that has always seemed to work. I even want to say it’s a firmware level change, meaning it will survive being changed to a different system unless the new system runs an equivalent command that disables it. Though don’t quote me on that, it’s been ages since i’ve run such a program.

        2. Sudosu Bronze badge

          Re: Anyone still buying WD?

          The greens were terrible.

          The older reds are awesome.

        3. RedGreen925

          Re: Anyone still buying WD?

          "I stupidly bought a WD green, and was disappointed with it's life span despite it not being heavily used.

          I'd still buy blacks and reds though."

          I got a grand total of 280 power on hours according to the smartctl output from the others, out of their piece of junk Red Pro NAS drive I had to RMA a few weeks ago. I must say their RMA process left a bad impression, five phone calls to get the shipping label out of them scumbags. The whole process seems to be designed to prevent you from getting the warranty from them. By the end of it the option to talk to a person was removed from their phone support line as they were re-organizing it for better customer service, by not giving you any access to a person who could do anything for you. The last time I got through to a person I was calling to find out why despite having my drive in their possession for over five business days it was not listed as received. Then the web support system was updated to show the drive was there and replacement was shipped days before, which was true when checking the tracking. Not one single email from them about this but plenty of god damn spam emails about my great opportunity for a 10% discount on my next purchase. It took four tries at their marketing spam removal link to hopefully get rid of them. Who knows the daily spam has not happened for a good week now so it must have taken hold....

      2. steviebuk Silver badge

        Re: Anyone still buying WD?

        Datahoarder visitor on reddit by any chance?

    3. The Dogs Meevonks Silver badge

      Re: Anyone still buying WD?

      I used to rip out the HDD's from their external drives to run in my mediaserver because they were so much cheaper than buying bare drives... until they started using an extra power detection circuit that disabled them from running if not installed in their enclosures.

      Easy fix, a tiny piece of gaff tape over the 3 pins and it's picked up just fine in disk manager.

      But seriously... fuck companies that pull this shit.

      I switched to seagate external drives after that... also cheaper and I've not had a 14TB failure yet after around 40k hrs of use.

      I've been replacing the small capacity drives in my server with larger ones as and when I need more space... which is every couple of years... and if you can call 6TB drives... small.

      I was going to start replacing the 6TB ones with 8TB SSD's as the price was dropping to sub £300 for Samsung 870's, but then the price gouging started again and they're now closer to £600 again.

      So back to 14TB externals once more.

    4. steviebuk Silver badge

      Re: Anyone still buying WD?

      I have lots of WD passport drives and they've lasted years.

    5. Richard Boyce

      Re: Anyone still buying WD?

      I stopped buying WD after the WD Red scandal, where they quietly replaced CMR drives with SMR drives that weren't fit for NAS. At first they denied it, then admitted it but denied it was a problem. After that, I started buying Seagate, so I dodged the next scandal, again in NAS, where they triggered false drive failure warnings as soon as drives ran out of warranty.

  2. Kev99 Silver badge

    Mictosoft has been writing software for how many decades and STILL cannot ship a clean product? Sounds like a GIGO problem for WD.

    1. TReko Silver badge

      MS Users: Free worldwide QA

      Microsoft shut down most of their QA in 2015 and offshored the rest.

      Microsoft users now do their QA for them, hence the need for for "Telemetry".

    2. Ian Johnston Silver badge

      Mictosoft has been writing software for how many decades and STILL cannot ship a clean product?

      And I have just had a kernel upgrade for Linux Mint.

      1. TeeCee Gold badge
        WTF?

        With the same level of relevance, I note that there are still elephants in the zoo and Tesco have sausages in stock.

  3. Snapper
    Mushroom

    WD has form

    Apart from their blatant selling of HD's for NAS drives which were technically incapable of being re-silvered, WD has history as far as this sort of thing is concerned.

    When Apple launched macOS 10.9 Mavericks back in 2013, a lot of my clients found that any WD drive attached to the Mac had just been wiped. At the time I strongly encouraged my clients to have backups so if the backup was a WD drive, that got wiped. if a second backup was also a WD drive that got wiped as soon as it was plugged in. Cue a lot of frantic emails and phone calls early that morning.

    Apparently WD had been warned by Apple that there were problems with the software drivers, but WD ignored the advice.

    Data was recoverable but like any drive that's been wiped you tend to get lots of folders with 10,000 photos in each starting with 00001.jpg for example. Luckily the modified dates were not wiped but it nearly put a couple of my designer clients out of business.

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: WD has form

      So Apple could have blocked the known-bad driver until WD fixed it, yet chose not to do that and shipped, knowing this would happen?

      That's more than somewhat evil.

      1. Spazturtle Silver badge

        Re: WD has form

        Stores devices use a generic driver, when they have bugs it is in the firmware.

        1. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: WD has form

          Ah, you sweet summer child.

          Apparently WD had been warned by Apple that there were problems with the software drivers, but WD ignored the advice.

          If that's true, then Apple chose to actively delete user data.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Western Dataloss

    Who buys Western Dataloss SSDs?

    I quit dealing with them completely when fully 50% of the hard drives I saw failed were Western Dataloss - and nowhere close to 50% of the drives I sold were theirs.

    1. AJ MacLeod

      Re: Western Dataloss

      Hard to tell whether Seagate or WD were worse for HDD failures, but to be fair I've used quite a lot of WD's SSDs without any issues so far.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Western Dataloss

        ALL the makers have shipped bad product over the years, Issues are invariably one model or family of product (sometimes resurrecting issues previously fixed - which is a major QC and company internal documenation issue)

        Both WD ad SG have repeatedly attempted to sidestep their responsibilities when shipping bad products. As such they don't get any of my SSD business. I don't reward bad behaviour with more purchases

      2. Lee D Silver badge

        Re: Western Dataloss

        WDs aren't anywhere near the unreliability of Seagates:

        https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

        Been true for many, many years.

  5. Kevin Johnston

    Accidental bonus

    The way I read the article is that Microsoft will be blocking systems using one of the affected SSDs from updating Windows 11. Sounds like a win to me

    1. Lee D Silver badge

      Re: Accidental bonus

      (Goes out and buys one of those drives just to shut Windows up...)

  6. EvaQ
    Megaphone

    "BSOD" now an official word?

    "... where the drive may cause a BSOD on Windows 11 24H2."

    Funny: "BSOD" in official communication by a hardware vendor.

    I checked, but Microsoft itself doesn't use it

  7. dharmOS

    WD Dashboard is hopeless software

    I have both the NVMe SSD SN 770M and 770 in 2 TB in two separate AMD APU machines running Win 11. One runs the WD Dashboard software required to update the firmware, the other crashes the software on loading. There is no reason why and the internet reports how crap the software is.

    In the end I had to try black magic (perusing Linux Arch websites on how to download and apply the firmware sans Windows) to download the firmware and then run the Dashboard in Windows safe mode to update.

    More is the issue at how crap WD is at writing essential software for updating their hardware on the most common OS out there.

  8. Jellied Eel Silver badge

    Help! I think I've been bitten!

    So I have a Win11 PC with a WD NVMe boot disk. That now tells me in the UEFI bios that the drive is failing and I should make a backup, and won't boot.

    No problem, I thought, slap in another HD, install Win11 on that, patch the NVMe and start my road to recovery.

    Or just start cursing MS more than I usually do. Win11 DVD tells me it won't install to the new disk, only GPT. But I can now run a DOS prompt and it looks like the NVMe drive has been plonked into protection / read-only mode. Sooo._ if I can get that back to normal mode, it might boot, but the bios doesn't seem to have any option to do that. It seems strange that the bios can put it in a state it cant get out of. And then to add to the fun, I'm guessing the reason I cant install on the new drive is because the MBR is on the locked NVMe

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Help! I think I've been bitten!

      I would offer some helpful advice, if you weren't a vatnik troll.

      1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

        Re: Help! I think I've been bitten!

        Hoho(l)!

        But I think your comment neatly demonstrates who is the actual troll. But I've managed to mostly recover, and not sure if the death of my NVMe drive was due to the 24H2 bug, or just natural causes. But it also meant I got to learn more about the joys of diskpart, EFI, and manually creating hives. So now I have a multi-boot system, which was something I'd been meaning to do anyway. After cursing MS in ways that would make the saltiest sailor blush.

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