Own a Western Digital SSD? Windows 11 24H2 could be a BSoD nightmare - but there's a fudged fix

It seems that Windows 11 24H2 has another bug, and a pretty nasty one at that, affecting some of those who have a Western Digital SSD.

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One of the affected SSDs is the WD Black SN770, which it has to be said is an excellent drive, the current bug aside (Image Credit: WD)

After installing the 24H2 update, owners of certain NVMe drives are finding that Blue Screen of Death crashes are being triggered randomly, seriously disrupting their PC usage - or even worse, they're ending up in a boot loop, one of the most-feared negative outcomes from an update.

TechSpot, which noticed the problem being reported on WD's community forum, notes that the bug seems to mainly hit those with WD Black SN770 and WD Blue SN580 SSDs (which don't have DRAM-based cache).

The issue is seemingly wrapped up in the Host Memory Buffer feature (HMB), which isn't in a cache on-drive with these models lacking that DRAM. Instead, the cache is held in the PC's system RAM, and the size of this appears to be the root cause.

While neither WD nor Microsoft have been drawn to comment yet, there is a workaround posted on the mentioned forum. It comes in the form of a Registry fix, creating two new entries - though apparently for some folks, it's good enough to simply disable HMB.

While setting HMBAllocationPolicy to 0 works fine according to some reports, other WD SSD owners have tried setting HMBAllocationPolicy to 2, which rather than disabling, seemingly sets the buffer to 64MB - apparently the correct size, not 200MB as is being set by 24H2 - and this prevents crashing too. (While still providing the cache-related performance boost, so that's preferable to disabling the cache entirely).

Registry or rollback, the choice is yours

If you're not happy with Windows 11 24H2 causing BSoDs and you don't want to be messing about in the Registry, then multiple reports confirm that rolling back to version 23H2 solves the problem. You can then wait it out, until either Microsoft tweaks 24H2, or maybe WD issues a firmware fix. (Installing the very latest SSD firmware has not worked as a solution, in case you were wondering).

This is a troublesome misstep here, so we hope that both firms are working to swiftly remedy it. Remember that Windows 11 24H2 is on a phased rollout, with only a limited number of users getting it so far.

These WD NVMe SSDs are popular drives, so if the 24H2 update starts filtering out to more of them, that could be a real headache for people. Although that said, Microsoft should already be investigating this, and we expect the software giant to enact a compatibility hold for PCs with affected drives pretty sharpish, blocking the upgrade for these machines until the issue is dealt with.

Read more: Windows 11 24H2 arrives out of the blue - here's what to expect on normal (non-Copilot+) PCs