Hewlett Packard Enterprise warns of SSD flaw that kills drives after precisely 40,000 Hours
Stop us if you think you've heard this one before, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is warning customers to install a critical patch to stop certain SSD models from dying after 40,000 hours of use.
With echoes of a flaw that was revealed in November that caused drives to fail after 32,768 hours, HPE advises its customers to install a critical firmware upgrade if they use one of several SAS Solid State Drive models. The firm predicts that no drives should fail until October 2020 -- so there's plenty of time to act -- but it is still important to take action.
The flaw affects four SSD drives -- the EK0800JVYPN, EO1600JVYPP, MK0800JVYPQ and MO1600JVYPR -- and the urgent advice from HPE is to install the HPD7 firmware. Without this update installed, drives will fail after 4 years, 206 days and 16 hours of operation, and there is the stark warning that when failure occurs neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered. HPE has a handy guide to checking your usage time here.
In an advisory about the issue, HPE says:
This HPD7 firmware is considered a critical fix and is required to address the issue detailed below. HPE strongly recommends immediate application of this critical fix. Neglecting to update to SSD Firmware Version HPD7 will result in drive failure and data loss at 40,000 hours of operation and require restoration of data from backup if there is no fault tolerance, such as RAID 0 or even in a fault tolerance RAID mode if more SSDs fail than can be supported by the fault tolerance of the RAID mode on the logical drive. Example: RAID 5 logical drive with two failed SSDs.
HPE was notified by a Solid State Drive (SSD) manufacturer of a firmware defect affecting certain SAS SSD models used in a number of HPE server and Storage products (i.e., HPE ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo 4200, Synergy Storage Modules, D3000 Storage Enclosure, StoreEasy 1000 Storage). The issue affects SSDs with an HPE firmware version prior to HPD7 that results in SSD failure at 40,000 hours of operation.
More details are available in HPE's customer bulletin.
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