Kingston’s new DC3000ME Gen5 U.2 SSD arrives as one of the clearest statements yet that PCIe 5.0 enterprise flash is moving out of the OEM-only channel and into mainstream procurement — a high-capacity, 1‑DWPD data center drive with Gen5 performance, broad security and telemetry features, and...
Windows 11 ships with a focused toolkit for PC gaming — from Game Mode and Auto HDR to DirectStorage and per‑app GPU control — and when you combine those features with up‑to‑date drivers, the right power profile, and thoughtful storage management you can measurably boost FPS, reduce stutters...
auto hdr
benchmarks
directstorage
driver updates
game mode
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overclocking
per app gpu selection
per-app gpu
performance tuning
power plan
storage sense
system optimization
windows 11
windows 11 gaming
HP and Riot Games have turned a routine OEM tie-up into one of the smarter licensed drops of the year: the OMEN 35L VALORANT Limited Edition transforms HP’s capable OMEN 35L chassis into a fully themed VALORANT desktop with custom cosmetics, a magnetic Gun Buddy accessory, and a choice of...
Windows 11’s crash screen may look familiar, but the reasons behind the crash and the route to recovery are rarely simple — this feature walks through practical, verified BSOD (and the newer black crash‑screen) troubleshooting, consolidates the basic steps Guiding Tech outlines, and layers in...
Phison’s latest public testing and community forensics have reframed the mid‑August Windows 11 SSD scare: what began as frantic reports that the Windows 11 August cumulative updates (commonly tracked as KB5063878 and the related KB5062660) were “bricking” NVMe drives now appears to be a...
A small Taiwanese PC‑building community may have just pulled a loose thread that explains a wave of terrifying reports about Windows 11 “bricking” SSDs: the drives that failed in public tests were running pre‑release, engineering firmware — not the production firmware shipped to regular...
Windows 11’s August cumulative update set off an alarm in enthusiast circles when a string of reproducible tests showed NVMe SSDs vanishing under sustained large writes — but the emerging, vendor‑validated explanation reframes the catastrophe as a narrower supply‑chain and firmware‑provenance...
A sudden wave of reports last month that solid‑state drives were vanishing from both File Explorer and UEFI/BIOS left Windows 11 users alarmed — but the truth, based on community forensics and vendor testing, is more complicated than a simple “bad Windows update” narrative.
Background /...
In a story that moved swiftly from Reddit threads to high-traffic YouTube videos and mainstream tech headlines, recent reports blamed Microsoft's Windows 11 updates (notably KB5063878 and KB5062660) for a rash of SSD failures. The picture that has emerged after vendor investigations is more...
External portable drives remain one of the most practical — and fastest — ways to move, back up, and archive large volumes of data, and our hands-on testing confirms that the current crop of external SSDs and HDDs gives buyers choices that span blistering performance, rock-solid value, and...
A fresh line of forensic work from community labs suggests the wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs that alarmed Windows users in August may not be a mass Windows regression at all, but instead a narrower supply‑chain and firmware‑provenance problem: pre‑release (engineering)...
Windows 11 users and system builders were jolted in mid‑August when a flurry of reports described NVMe SSDs suddenly disappearing, corrupting files or becoming completely inaccessible during large, sustained writes — an incident initially blamed on Microsoft’s August cumulative update...
Phison’s pre-release controller firmware has emerged as the most plausible explanation for the wave of NVMe SSD “vanishing” and bricking reports that followed Microsoft’s mid‑August Windows 11 cumulative updates — a finding that reframes the incident from a suspected OS regression into a...
The short version: the recent wave of reports that Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) was “bricking” NVMe SSDs has been reframed by community investigators and vendor labs — the immediate trigger appears to have been pre‑release engineering firmware on a small subset of drives...
controller firmware
data backup
data loss
engineering firmware
firmware provenance
heavy writes
kb5063878
nvme
phison
postmortem analysis
ssd firmware
storage reliability
supply chain
vendor telemetry
windows 11
windows update
Microsoft’s August Windows 11 patch is no longer the prime suspect in the recent wave of “vanishing” NVMe drives — mounting evidence points to pre‑release controller firmware and supply‑chain provenance, not the KB5063878/KB5062660 updates themselves, as the root trigger in the cases...
Phison has publicly acknowledged and replicated a key finding first raised by the PCDIY community: a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs linked in timing to Windows 11’s August cumulative update (KB5063878) appears to have been driven, in at least some test cases, by...
Phison’s latest public testing and fresh community forensics have changed the tone of an urgent story that began as “Windows 11 is killing SSDs” and quickly morphed into a complex investigation at the intersection of OS updates, controller firmware, and supply‑chain quirks — with no single party...
A cluster of community test benches and vendor statements now point to a supply‑chain firmware issue — not a Windows code regression — as the most plausible explanation for the mid‑August reports of NVMe drives “vanishing” during large sequential writes after the Windows 11 August cumulative...
The investigation into a wave of disappearing and allegedly “bricked” NVMe SSDs that followed Microsoft’s August Windows 11 security rollup has taken a new turn: community researchers now say the problem was triggered not by Microsoft’s patch but by pre-release engineering firmware present on a...
A cluster of community test benches and vendors dug into one of this summer’s more alarming update chases: after Microsoft’s August 12, 2025 cumulative for Windows 11 24H2 (KB5063878) some users reported NVMe drives disappearing mid‑write and, in a minority of cases, returning corrupted or...