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from the you-don't-always-get-what-you-pay-for dept.
An enterprise SSD flaw will brick hardware after exactly 40,000 hours:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has warned that certain SSD drives could fail catastrophically if buyers don't take action soon. Due to a firmware bug, the products in question will be bricked exactly 40,000 hours (four years, 206 days and 16 hours) after the SSD has entered service. "After the SSD failure occurs, neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered," the company warned in a customer service bulletin.
[...] The drives in question are 800GB and 1.6TB SAS models and storage products listed in the service bulletin here. It applies to any products with HPD7 or earlier firmware. HPE also includes instructions on how to update the firmware and check the total time on the drive to best plan an upgrade. According to HPE, the drives could start failing as early as October this year.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday March 27 2020, @10:14AM (10 children)
I've never updated the firmware on a drive before - if I could have afforded to buy one of these 40,000 hours ago then this might be fun.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @11:29AM (4 children)
Updating firmware is really easy. Years ago I had to do it and at that time you had to hook it up to a Windows machine and run a program from the CMD line! It only took a minute to update. I hope the updater code has been updated itself. At that time you obviously needed to take the disk offline and physically remove it to update it.
Given that these are "only" 800 GB and 1.6 TB drives, it will probably be more cost effective to just replace them with bigger drives instead of updating all the firmwares, at least for servers with really large bays. Small instances, like home users and small businesses, this shouldn't be that bad of a process, just a PITA.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday March 27 2020, @01:21PM (3 children)
Lets hope that they have improved the system - many enlightened users will have Linux installed, and not Windows.... ;-)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday March 27 2020, @02:15PM (2 children)
Sadly, many firmware (motherboard, auxiliary devices, external devices, hard disks, optical drives, etc.) updaters only run on Windows.
A few come with self-booting images, IE. - you "burn" the image file to an optical or USB drive, boot from that, and it runs the updater.
In the olden days many updaters created a bootable floppy disk and you booted that and ran the update.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday March 27 2020, @05:01PM (1 child)
Actually, one mainboard I had had the BIOS updater as part of the BIOS itself: You would boot into BIOS, and then select a special option to read the new BIOS from an USB stick.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday March 27 2020, @08:59PM
Yes, many do that now, maybe most. And I'm super glad they got away from having to run Windows just to update firmware. :)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RS3 on Friday March 27 2020, @02:36PM (4 children)
About 10 years ago I did some work for an audio engineer who is moderately famous- you'll see his name in some TV show / movie credits. He was genius.
Anyway, he had a Seagate 1 TB drive (huge 10 years ago) full of major paid recording sessions with significant people. Not backed up of course. The drive bricked. I happened to be there one day he was in anguish and told me what had happened.
I had already heard about these Seagate drives that brick themselves. I found a procedure for patching the firmware.
You had to remove the drive's control board. No biggie, right? Oh but wait- don't remove that board yet...
You had to use a serial port (RS232) with 12V to 5V (TTL) converter and connect to a 5V serial port on the hard disk. Special connector needed too. And of course some kind of serial port software, like "hyperterm", minicom, procomm, etc.
You had to power up the bricked drive, with the serial port connected, connected to a Windows machine.
Give some very cryptic commands to the drive through the serial port software.
One of the commands tells the motor to stop spinning.
When the drive stopped spinning, still powered up, you had to very very carefully REMOVE THE CONTROLLER BOARD.
Then give some more commands.
Then reattach the controller board. Yes, STILL POWERED UP. Yikes.
Then some more commands. Drive spins up.
Then run the Windows-based Seagate firmware updater.
It all worked and saved the guy's butt.
Thankfully I've never had to do such a procedure since then.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Friday March 27 2020, @04:19PM (1 child)
That is a "steely eyed missile man" level fix right there. Bravo.
Hope the guy that did not do backups paid well for that service.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:13AM
Thank you for the high praises.
I don't know if he did pay me for that, but he gave me a couple of things worth $, including an awesome cable tester called a "Swizz Army" https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ebtech-Swizz-Army-6-In-1-Cable-Tester-Tone-Tester-w-Phantom-Power-Detection/313034155509 [ebay.com] if anyone ever needs such a thing. Does test tones, detects intermittents (LED latches ON to show intermittent- very useful), etc.
It was more a matter of me keeping him in business so I could get more work through him. I can't even guess how much all those studio tracks were worth. The drive was full. Close to 1,000 hours of mono track (24 bit samples, 96k/s sample rate), many were paid musicians, etc.
A huge percentage of non-IT knowledgeable people have no clue about storage reliability (lack of), doing backups, etc.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @07:39PM (1 child)
Ah yes. The BSY brick bug. I still have this in my bookmarks for some reason https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday March 27 2020, @09:04PM
Oh gosh, not sure if I should thank you for bringing back the memory, but thank you. I don't remember all of those details. Maybe I had found a different procedure? I don't remember doing the cardboard insulator.
Have you done that procedure to a drive?
My solution: never ever ever buy a Seagate drive. That said, I don't think any drive is reliable anymore.