If you are using a Western Digital SN580 or SN770 solid-state drive, you may experience a blue screen of death after installing or upgrading to Windows 1124H2. Both solid-state drives do not have a DRAM cache module. The cache module acts as a data transfer station. When writing data, it can pre-write data to a faster cache module and then write it to the hard disk.

Although Microsoft has not yet released a detailed description and solution to this problem, some users have confirmed after investigation and testing that this problem is caused by incorrect allocation of the host memory buffer size.

NVMe SSDs generally tend to be allocated 64MB of space on Windows 10/11, but can also be allocated 100MB or more, with the allocation appearing to reach 200MB on the SN580 and SN770.

The allocation of this space may conflict with certain system settings, resulting in frequent blue screens of death. Modifying the buffer allocation through the registry can help solve this problem, at least temporarily.

Note: If you are using an affected solid-state drive and have upgraded to Windows 1124H2, it is recommended not to adjust the registry according to the following method if frequent blue screens of death do not occur.

Here are temporary solutions:

  • Click on the taskbar search box and enter regedit to open the Registry Editor

  • Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlStorPort

  • Create a new DWORD 32-bit value here and name it HmbAllocationPolicy (if there is this value, there is no need to create a new one)

  • Double-click HmbAllocationPolicy and change its key value to 0, 1, 3 for testing

  • 0=Turn off HMB space allocation

  • 1=Allocate HMB space to minimum

  • 2=Allocate HMB space to maximum

  • 3=Allocate HMB space as appropriate

    • Restart the system and test it after it takes effect. If the blue screen of death problem still exists, you can change 0 to 3 or change 3 to 0. This should temporarily prevent frequent blue screen of death problems. After Microsoft releases an official solution, delete this registry key value so that the system can be restored to the default settings.