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Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) alerts its customers once again that all Serial-Attached SCSI solid-state drives will malfunction after 40,000 hours of operation, unless there is a vital patch.

The business made a similar announcement in November 2019, when a software defect after 32,768 hours of running caused a malfunction.

Drives that were affected

The current issue affects HPE hard drives and storage items such as HPE ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo 4200, Synergy Storage Modules, StoreEasy 1000 Storage, D3000 Storage Enclosure.

The company says this is a detailed list of SSDs it makes available that have been affected. The problem, however, is not specific to HPE, and may be present in other manufacturers ‘ drives.

If the SSD runs a firmware version older than HPD7 in the HPE products, they will fail after having been turned on for 40,000 hours; this translates into 4 years, 206 days, 16 hours which is around half a year less than the extended warranty available to others.

Once the failure point is reached, the data can not be retrieved, nor the hard drive. In environments with data backup systems, avoidance of such a catastrophe is possible.

HPE has heard of a SSD manufacturer’s firmware flaw and warns that if SSDs are installed and placed into operation at the same time they are likely to fail almost 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 [e.g. RAID 5 logical drive with two failed SSDs]” – HPE advisory

The new firmware can be installed by using the online flash component for VMware ESXi, Windows, and Linux.

Last month, Dell EMC released new firmware to correct a bug which caused nine SanDisk SSDs to fail in its portfolio “after approximately 40,000 hours of usage.” Dell reported the following models to be affected:

  • LT0200MO
  • LT0400MO
  • LT0800MO
  • LT1600MO
  • LT0200WM
  • LT0400WM
  • LT0800WM
  • LT0800RO
  • LT1600RO

The update corrects a test to log the index value for the circular buffer. “Assert had a poor check to verify the index value of the circular buffer. Instead of checking the max value as N, it searched for N-1, ‘ explains Dell’s advisory.

Customers that were shipped one or more of the affected SSD models were informed about this “potentially critical issue” with the recommendation to apply the update immediately.

Dell EMC Firmware update message

source: Ravigon