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I'm wearing my Mr Smartypants face today.

The latest Windows 11 update is causing problems... sometimes *huge* problems.

According to multiple reports from reputable sources, the new update can cause huge problems on some systems when transferring large chunks of data to SSDs.

Apparently the trigger threshold is about 50GB which, at one time, was a huge amount of data but these days it's not an uncommon amount of data to be writing to a disk. Many games easily exceed this size and I know that I regularly transfer folders of video files that may be over 100GB.

So what's the problem?

Apparently users are finding that after the latest update, an attempt to transfer these large chunks of data to an SSD causes the target drive to disappear from the OS list of connected storage devices and then things crash.

That alone wouldn't be too much of an issue but the problem appears to be worse. During the crash it's quite likely that the data on the SSD will be corrupted.

Sometimes a reboot will see the affected SSD re-appear but in some cases the drive is so corrupted that it is no longer recognised by Windows which makes data-recovery impossible.

Right now, even though this has been widely reported and pretty well documented, Microsoft is not admitting any fault on their part -- perhaps because of the risk of huge liabilities.

Although I haven't read the MS license for Windows 11 I would expect that it basically says "use at your own risk, no responsibility accepted for losses or damages" but that could always be challenged in court if enough people lose enough data (aka: money) and/or drives are bricked.

The advice right now is to uninstall the update if it's already been applied to your system or to suspend updates if not.

Making this issue even worse is the fact that there used to be way to permanently suspend Windows 11 updates by way of registry hacks. For users of non-enterprise versions of Windows, this capability has been removed by Microsoft so the best you can do is temporarily pause the update cycle for a week or two, after which time you're getting updated and possibly bricked - like it or not.

This gives Microsoft only a small window in which to fix this problem and roll out a new update before the shite would really hit the fan.

As I've mentioned in the past, I only have one PC with Windows installed on it these days and that's my video editing machine. All others run Linux and they do so for a very good reason.

Linux gives me total control of if, when and where I apply updates. I don't come back to my Linux machines to find that they've been remotely rebooted and work-inprogress lost after a bunch of unsolicited patches were downloaded while I was busy doing something else. This shadow updating is totally unacceptable but, now they've disabled turning off updates for non-enterprise users, it is just something Windows 11 users will have to live with.

One minute you might have a perfectly stable, secure system that you've set performing a task while you leave the room for an hour or two. On your return, that task may have been interrupted, data lost and the whole system rebooted into a state where the updates have crippled it or may risk further corrupting your data or hardware.

Who in their right mind finds this acceptable?

Even the machine that does (out of necessity) run Windows here is not running version 11. Instead I've stuck with Windows 10, despite the constant nagging and attempts to trick me into upgrading.

Fortunately, as far as I'm aware, this latest update bug doesn't affect Windows 10 so it's business as usual for me -- while Windows 11 users may soon be typing with crossed fingers in the hope that this update doesn't destroy their data or even their SSDs.

Linux isn't perfect -- but at least it doesn't try to destroy your computer and your sanity.

If it turns out that this update costs millions of people hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) because Microsoft couldn't organise a fart in a bean factory, who pays for the losses?

Carpe Diem folks!

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