HPE has told customers that four kinds of solid-state drives (SSDs) in its servers and storage systems may experience failure and data loss at 40,000 hours, or 4.5 years, of operation.
The IT titan said in a bulletin this month the “issue is not unique to HPE and potentially affects all customers that purchased these drives.” HPE has not identified the SSD maker, though, and refused to do so, saying: “We’re not confirming manufacturers.”
Your humble vulture has seen evidence the faulty drives were made by Western-Digital-owned SanDisk. WD declined to comment.
Meanwhile, Dell-EMC issued an urgent firmware update last month that also mentioned SSDs failing after 40,000 operating hours, and specifically identified SanDisk SAS drives. The update included firmware version D417 as a fix to prevent future data loss.
If you’re getting deja-vu, you’re not alone. HPE separately warned of certain SAS SSDs dying after their 32,768th hour of operation in November last year.
Drawing a line between these two blunders, HPE noted this month: “While the failure mode is similar, this [latest] issue is unrelated to the SSD issue detailed in this customer bulletin released in November 2019, which describes an SSD failure at 32,768 hours of operation.”
To avoid this new data death bug, HPE customers should install SSD firmware version HPD7, described as a “critical” fix. From the March bulletin:
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 (ie: 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 (ie: 4 years, 206 days, 16 hours).