Has there ever been a major Windows update that hasn’t messed up something somewhere?
Another Windows update, another round of users complaining about crashes and bugs. While hardly news, this time around the fault is very specific but also very annoying, and it concerns Western Digital SSDs, specifically its SN770 and SN580 models. It seems that these drives just aren’t ready for the 24H2 update and the result is a glut of crashes and infamous Blue Screens of Death (BSODs).
All of these troubles were flagged up by SN770/SN580 owners on Western Digital’s community forums (via TechSpot). It looks like the problem revolves around something called the Host Memory Buffer (HMB). All SSDs store a map of where data is located within its flash memory chips and this constantly gets updated, as information gets deleted and added.
Some SSDs have a single DRAM module on them and store the map in that, but many gaming SSDs are DRAM-less (to reduce the price tag) and instead, store this map in a little bit of the PC’s system memory.
