Phison confirms potential real reason for "Windows 11 SSD killing and corruption" bug

Earlier this weekend we covered what could be the actual cause of the SSD failures that were seemingly hit by the August 2025 Patch Tuesday update. The new report, thanks to the efforts of a PC DIY enthusiast Facebook group, suggested that preview engineering firmware was the involved behind the cause of the drive failures. Check our dedicated coverage here for all the details.

Following our publication, we reached out to Phison as the report had suggested that the company's engineers had confirmed the problem in the labs across certain Corsair, Silicon Power (SP), and Apacer drives.

Earlier today, Phison responded confirming the findings. The firm provided the following statement to Neowin:

In response to the recent PCDIY! Facebook post, Phison engaged the PCDIY! contact to investigate.

 

The results shown in the link below detail that Phison examined the exact SSDs used in the PCDIY! testing and determined PCDIY! was utilizing an engineering preview firmware, which is not the final firmware used in the CORSAIR FORCE SERIES MP600 SSD 2TB and other drives with the E16 controller available for sale to consumers on the market. Phison also replicated the PCDIY! tests on-site with the same SSD models and the same stress tests (100GB/1TB writes) utilizing consumer-available SSDs and found no failures or crashes.

Thus, Phison has confirmed that the stress tests managed to wear out drives when using a version of non-retail engineering firmware, at least in the case of the Corsair FORCE MP600 SSD that is based on the Phison E16 NAND controller.

We have also reached out to Corsair regarding the issue.

Source

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Posted Monday 8 September 2025 at 5:55 pm AEST (my time).

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