HPE has recently released a support document regarding a firmware issue in several Solid-State Drives that are used in many of HPE’s server and storage products. Due to the magnitude of the issue and the possibility of major data loss, Techfident is taking the opportunity to advise customers who use HPE SSDs and ensure that affected drives are updated to prevent the issue and remove the possibility of the loss of our customers’ data.

To cut a long story short, any affected drive will fail after exactly 32,768 hours of operation (3 years, 270 days and 8 hours). HPE also added that any other SSDs that were installed at the same time, may also fail and after the SSD failure occurs, neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered.

Not all doom and gloom however, good news is that a simple firmware update will completely negate the issue and affected drives will continue to work as expected going forward. HPE’s ‘HPD8’ firmware update can be downloaded from the link in resources below.

If you think that your business operations may be affected, Techfident recommends fully reading both the support document and installation instructions to ensure updates are properly performed. Significantly, HPE accepts no responsibility for any data loss therefore it’s vital the update is performed as promptly as possible.

Resources:

To determine how long your SSDs have been running, check out HPE’s guide here.

Full list of affect SKUs, please read HPE’s full support document here.

Those looking to update their drives can download the most recent firmware and read HPE’s update instructions here.