The "windows trashes your disk bug" is a new one to me so I decided to investigate. This is what I found:
1) Reported to be caused by update KB5063878 2) Reported to only affect SSDs with Phison controllers running early/beta drive firmware on the SSD 3) Claimed by Microsoft and Phison to not exist However 1) Microsoft update KB5065426 replaced KB5063878 2) Phison has released SSD firmware updates since KB5063878 3) The bug seems to have mysteriously vanished in that there's no current reports of it that approached the level of reports that came out right after KB5063878 was released 4) There's a high signal to noise ratio on this bug because a lot of people were reporting it on stuff that wasn't SSDs I saw one report on a mag media drive for example 5) The bug caused the drives to just disappear. But a lot of reports were not saying that they were saying other things like the drive failed early, all of this made the signal to noise ratio much worse 6) Laptop drives have a higher failure rate than desktop 3.5" drives because of a) tight spaces increase component heat b) Mechanical movement stresses parts and can break connections in a laptop that have an effect on drive electronics 7) The general public is apparently not capable of unscrewing the bottom of laptop cases and replacing SSDs which are known wearable devices and are cheap, thus has unreasonably high expectations that SSDs are gonna last forever. It's important to understand that Phison does not sell direct to end users. They sell to OEMs like Crucial, Dell and others. If the bug is confined to specific hardware while other hardware is unaffected, then it is NOT a software bug which means Microsoft is perfectly credible when they claimed they could not reproduce the bug. Microsoft has nothing to lose if they said there WAS a bug and they released a fix - since Windows is a monopoly people are not going to stop using it - and, Microsoft has admitted numerous bugs in the past over the years that they fixed, such as the processor microcode debacle around a decade ago that caused numerous bluescreens. Phison, on the other hand, has an ENORMOUS amount to lose if they admit to a firmware bug in their hardware. Nobody in the general public has shown code disassembly proving out this bug they only were using general tools that track writes to SSDs and so forth that seem to indicate after KB5063878 that the number of reads and writes to SSDs greatly increased. So yes possibly something Microsoft did caused this bug to manifest in Phison drives. Since the original triggering KB was replaced, it's not easy now to try to go back and do binary file comparisons to prove that a "silent fix" was released by Microsoft. And of course, since Phison has released firmware updates for their SSDs, that's an admitted fix - despite the fact that Phison has claimed these updates "aren't to fix the bug" I don't have Phison hardware myself so I have no way of proving anything. But I can tell you about how business works. There is NOTHING that ANYONE in the general public can say that Phison is going to give a rat's ass about. But EVERYTHING in how the OEM's view Phison is what matters to them. It's clear to me that the OEMs like Dell, Crucial and so on, had a little secret meeting with Phison and told them "we don't know what is going on here. This started with Microsoft being blamed but we all know Microsoft is everyone's favorite whipping boy so they are always going to be blamed but they claim they aren't at fault and pointed out that you guys are the only ones affected. So for now - we are going to take Microsoft's side and we are going to agree with their logic that says if you folks are the only ones showing up in the reports, then it's your fault. We don’t give a crap how you deal with this but you better deal with it quick because if we keep seeing this 3-4 months from now we are finding different suppliers so our products don’t get smeared" The fact that just about all the posts on this are old tells me that Phison did, in fact, deal with it. Thus, NOTHING in my investigation of this shows any credibility to the claim that "Windows 11 is trashing your disks" and EVERYTHING points to Phison just screwing themselves and desperately lying, planting FUD, and ringer social medial posts, to delay people from understanding that they were actually to blame to give their devs time to figure out what they did wrong and fix it. Now as for the AI tools: 1) You can uninstall co-pilot from Apps 2) You can uninstall the enhanced copilot that gets installed if you install MS Office from Apps 3) Microsoft already collects "your data" and feeds it back to themselves via Telemetry. That is why they released Windows Enterprise and they released a supported method of turning all of this off, here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/manage-connections-from-windows-operating-system-components-to-microsoft-services Note that the information gleaned from the supported way of disabling Telemetry has been extended to other Windows versions like Windows Home, and there are tools that disable it, as well as disable the copilot AI, like this free one: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 Carbonite has cloud backup solutions for Linux in it's Core/Power/Ultimate professional plans, not in it's home user/consumer Basic/plus/prime plans. I think the takeaway here is: 1) Your typical Windows user is dumb as a box of rocks. They walk into the store, buy a computer, and expect to use it for 10 years until it hardware breaks, then they expect that hardware break to be trivial to fix and get them another 5-7 years out of the computer. They don't really give a crap what version of operating system is in use on the computer 2) Your typical Windows user is expecting to buy and use a computer like they buy and use a car. They are fine with spending $1500 for a computer but they want it to last 15 years. 3) The entire computer industry hates this and is constantly fighting against it. Some, like ASUS, deliberately engineer computers like water heaters - every component in their laptop is engineered to fail out in 5 years so they have a very high guarantee that the failure of one component will take out the entire machine. Others, like HP, use dual product lines - a business line that will last a long time but is terribly expensive and only sold to businesses who just automatically refresh when the warranty dies, and a consumer line that is cheaply made and will indeed break in 3 years unless the products are treated as carefully as cut crystal. 4) The computer industry media is somehow fixated on the idea that the general public gives a rat's ass about operating system versions and so on. They also cannot stand the idea of buying a computer like a car - because any slowing down of the constant product churn means they have a lot less to write about - so they also fight against that idea by waving around security bogymen and so on if you don't constantly update to new crap. I find the entire fight quite amusing. I can still get usable work out of 30 year old Pentiums and there's plenty of new distributions of FOSS operating systems that will boot on them. I've also had uptimes of 5 years or more on BSD systems that have never been updated. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Michael Ewan Sent: Saturday, December 6, 2025 7:28 PM To: Portland Linux/Unix Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Anyone see the latest Chicken Little headlines on Winders? A lot of reluctance comes from recent news of Windows 11 trashing your disk(s), and Microsoft enabling AI tools that feed all your data back to them for training purposes. I have one Windows box for running backups with Carbonite, upgraded to Windows 11 then downgraded back to Windows 10 after the Windows trashes your disk bug. I am looking for a good cloud based backup solution for Linux if anyone has any suggestions. Yes, I have backups, I have Linux servers backing data to other disks, and then backing to other machines on the home network. That is great for three copies of everything, but I want important stuff like photos also off site. On Sat, Dec 6, 2025 at 6:00 PM Ted Mittelstaedt <[email protected]> wrote: > > Looks like the following is making the rounds: > > > > https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/12/01/security-disaster-5 > 00-mil lion-microsoft-users-say-no-to-windows-11/ > > > > quick, get my smelling salts.. > > > > Ted > > >
