HPE Releases Critical Firmware Upgrade for SAS Solid State Drives

HPE’s enterprise-class solid-state drives have time bombs. HPE issued an emergency safety notice saying that some of its models of solid-state drives will stop working after 32,768 hours or 3 years, 270 days and 8 hours due to defective firmware. The SSD will stop working at almost the same time.

HPE wrote on the security bulletin

This HPD8 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 HPD8 will result in drive failure and data loss at 32,768 hours of operation and require restoration of data from backup in non-fault tolerance, such as RAID 0 and in fault tolerance RAID mode if more drives fail than what is supported by the fault tolerance RAID mode logical drive. By disregarding this notification and not performing the recommended resolution, the customer accepts the risk of incurring future related errors.

The issue affects SSDs with an HPE firmware version prior to HPD8 that results in SSD failure at 32,768 hours of operation (i.e., 3 years, 270 days 8 hours). 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.

Customers must update the firmware before the time bomb detonates, otherwise, the hard disk and data will be completely damaged. Affected models include HPE ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo, JBOD D3xxx, D6xxx, D8xxx, MSA, StoreVirtual 4335, and StoreVirtual 3200.