HPE issues update for SSDs that will fail after 40,000 hours

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) issued a bulletin to warn its customers that several of the SSDs it sold years ago suffer from a bug that causes them to fail at exactly 40,000 hours of operation. Disks with model number EK0800JVYPN, EO1600JVYPP, MK0800JVYPQ, and MO1600JVYPR need new firmware (version HPD7) to prevent disk failure. Based on the dates these disks started shipping from HPE, the company expects the first disks will start failing in October 2020 at the earliest.

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 (reference the table below) 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 (i.e., 4 years, 206 days, 16 hours).

Earlier this year, HPE already had an unrelated issue with disks that failed after 32,768 hours of operation.