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Certain HPE SSD Drives Will Brick After 40K Hours

Last week HPE issued customer bulletin a00097382en_us, which states:

HPE SAS Solid State Drives - Critical Firmware Upgrade Required for Certain HPE SAS Solid State Drive Models to Prevent Drive Failure at 40,000 Hours of Operation.

The HPE bulletin further states:

After the SSD failure occurs, neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered. In addition, SSDs which were put into service at the same time will likely fail nearly simultaneously. Restoration of data from backup will be required in non-fault tolerance modes (e.g., RAID 0) and in fault tolerance RAID mode if more drives fail than what is supported by the fault tolerance RAID mode logical drive. (Author's note: bold highlights are mine).

This could be a catastrophic event for organizations that are using these drives as the data on the drives will not be able to retrieved. Furthermore, if these drives are being used in a RAID configuration and if all the drives for a particular RAID were placed into service at the same time the protection that RAID offers will be useless as they will hit the 40,000 hours of operation at the same time. The drives in question are 800GB and 1.6TB SAS models. The exact models are listed in the service bulletin.

The good news is: the 40,000-hour limit will not hit the user community until October 2020; HPE has developed a tool to check if your vSphere, Linux or Windows systems have drives that will be effected by the issue; and most importantly HPE has a fix to correct this issue. Please refer to customer bulletin a00097382en_us for complete information regarding this issue.

It should also be noted that this is a separate issue addressed in Customer Bulletin a00092491en_us, which address a critical issue for HPE SAS SSD drives that fail after 32,768 hours of operation.

The tools that HPE references in the customer bulletin should definitely be used to detect this problem but if you are interested in seeing the model number and for how many hours they have been running you can reference my articles:

About the Author

Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He previously worked as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He also previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.

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