Matisyahu's Blog

Well, it appears that all the hype and hysteria was about nothing – as I noted in a previous post, there are many factors at play and given how limited the report there must be a logical reason for what is occuring. Well, it appears that the problem comes back to out of date firmware thanks to SSD vendors and hardware OEMs not making available firmware updates that would address the issue along with the BIOS in some systems not being updated as well (link),

I’ve just had a quick search on YouTube to see whether those spreading ‘the sky is falling’ hysteria have back peddled or maybe accepting that they had jumped the gun before having all the details. Did I find any of the main instigators doing a back peddle? nope, not a single one. No correction, no mea culpa, people replying to their their original video completely obvious that 9 hours ago The Verge put out an article outlining what the situation was.

Once again, this is the reason why I loathe the tech YouTuber space because it is filled with far too many people who know enough of the lingo to appear that they’re knowledgeable but in reality they’re just as clueless as someone who doesn’t know the lingo. I’ve had a look around at a few SSD and motherboard vendors and it appears that these problems may have been fixed by firmware updates released months ago. As for me, my Microsoft Surface Laptop (ARM based) has been rock solid and I’ve installed the September update (along with updates made available as part of patch Tuesday) without any problems.