Windows 11 update causes chaos for Western Digital SSD users

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 update, version 24H2, which brings in all sorts of new AI features and improvements, seems to have hit a bit of a snag. Folks using Western Digital NVMe SSDs face serious issues, like constant blue screen of death (BSOD) crashes.

The trouble seems to mainly affect WD Black SN770 and WD Blue SN580 SSDs—these don’t have DRAM-based cache. Instead, they rely on something called Host Memory Buffer (HMB), which came with NVMe standard version 1.2. This lets them use system RAM as cache, and usually, these drives grab about 64MB of it.

But with the new Windows 11 24H2 update, the system is suddenly reserving up to 200MB for I/O caching, way more than the typical 64MB. That extra 136MB seems to be throwing the SSDs off, and that’s what’s likely causing the frequent BSOD crashes.

Western Digital’s forums are flooded with users reporting these problems. Many say going back to the previous version of Windows 11 (23H2) solves the crashes, which suggests that the new update is the source of the issue.

This situation is part of a bigger pattern with Microsoft’s recent updates. Ever since they replaced their traditional in-house testing with the Windows Insider program, it seems like regular users have become unofficial beta testers. Sure, some updates bring nice performance boosts, but others, like this one, can make systems unstable.

For anyone dealing with this, there’s a workaround involving some registry tweaks to limit HMB to 64MB or even disable it completely. It might slow down performance during heavy file transfers, but it should semi-stabilize Windows 11 24H2 after a reboot.