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posted by janrinok on Friday March 27 2020, @09:03AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by RS3 on Friday March 27 2020, @02:58PM (8 children)

    by RS3 (6367) on Friday March 27 2020, @02:58PM (#976324)

    > mandatory decoupling between controller in the widest sense

    Agree. Occasionally I've been able to recover spinning magnetic hard disk data by replacing the controller board.

    Rather than take these (HPE SSD) kinds of risks with data, I'd be more inclined to use a controller that uses plugin microSD cards. If the controller dies, or even an individual SD card, just replace the thing that died.

    One example, and it will run them in RAID: https://the-gadgeteer.com/2016/03/17/turn-10-micro-sd-cards-into-a-sata-ssd-drive/ [the-gadgeteer.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday March 27 2020, @03:03PM (1 child)

    by RS3 (6367) on Friday March 27 2020, @03:03PM (#976325)

    That example looks cool, but further searching reveals shortcomings: it probably can only do RAID 0, which is no good. Also, I don't think it does wear-leveling, TRIM, etc., so again, no good. But the concept is great.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @03:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @03:17PM (#976340)

      I's a terrible concept because you can just buy two normal SSDs of comparable storage capacity for the price of the micro-SD cards you pin this thing, still have change left over, and the normal SSDs will perform better and last longer.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @03:11PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @03:11PM (#976332)

    Rather than take these (HPE SSD) kinds of risks with data, I'd be more inclined to use a controller that uses plugin microSD cards. If the controller dies, or even an individual SD card, just replace the thing that died.

    One example, and it will run them in RAID: https://the-gadgeteer.com/2016/03/17/turn-10-micro-sd-cards-into-a-sata-ssd-drive/ [the-gadgeteer.com]

    That seems like an overly expensive way to make a really slow SSD that will not last particularly long.

    • (Score: 4, Touché) by janrinok on Friday March 27 2020, @07:23PM (4 children)

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 27 2020, @07:23PM (#976420) Journal

      That seems like an overly expensive way to make a really slow SSD that will not last particularly long.

      Yeah, but other than that it would be OK.....

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:19AM (3 children)

        by RS3 (6367) on Saturday March 28 2020, @06:19AM (#976571)

        That is funny, but the ACs are missing the point. RTFS: "After the SSD failure occurs, neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered."

        With my idea, your data has a high likelihood of recovery. That is the point I was trying to make.

        Who cares about the cost of stupid hardware, whether the drive is $50 or $500. The data might be priceless. Why lose all your data because 1 controller died? Why lose all your data because 1 FLASH cell died and drags down an address crossbar? Pull the microSD cards, plug them into a new controller and you're back in business.

        • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:17PM (2 children)

          by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 29 2020, @10:17PM (#977037) Homepage Journal

          Why not just have a backup?

          • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday March 30 2020, @12:01AM (1 child)

            by RS3 (6367) on Monday March 30 2020, @12:01AM (#977063)

            I knew someone had to ruin a perfectly ludicrous argument by injecting reason, ration, and sanity. Harumph.

            Psst: nobody ever does those. We only talk smugly about them, and patronize those who lose data.

            Joking aside, the 1 TB audio engineer's drive was very very expensive 10 or so years ago, and I'm not sure he could afford any way to back up that much data. And, I think he was one of many people who just don't understand that storage is unreliable. It just doesn't occur to them.

            And to be more clear, it's not that they are unreliable, it's the disaster that occurs when they do fail, and you really rarely have any warning. And even if you do get some kind of warning, most people don't know what to do next.

            My first computer's hard disk failed after I had it for only a few weeks. I don't remember what data I lost, but it was good to learn that lesson early on in computing.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @04:28PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @04:28PM (#978088)

              Joking aside, the 1 TB audio engineer's drive was very very expensive 10 or so years ago

              1TB drives were not expensive 10 or so years ago. According to this chart of drive prices over time [backblaze.com] they cost about $0.11/GB back in Q1 2009, pricing them at about 100 USD which seems about right.

              Seriously: if you are at all worried about data loss due to drive failures you can just buy two drives and save everything to both of them.