Note: HPE is different from HP (Hewlett Packard), as the former split with HP in 2015. While HP retains PC and Printers business, HPE specializes in Servers, Storage, Networking, and Enterprise Services.
Abrupt stoppage after 40,000 hours!
The drive models in question are HPE server and Storage products like Synergy Storage Modules, StoreEasy 1000 Storage, D3000 Storage Enclosure, HPE, Synergy, Apollo 4200 and ProLiant. HPE also notes that this issue is not unique to only HPE customers, but all those who bought these drives. The company says the drives which are running on firmware older than HPD7, would die abruptly at 40,000 hours of service, translating the age to 4 years, 206 days and 16 hours. This is even better, as the firm has made such a similar announcement previously stating its drives would get deteriorated after 32,768 hours of operation. Considering the manufacturing date, the deadline is set for October this year. Thus, system admins have an ample amount of time to patch this vulnerability.
Patch or lose
Consequences for not aiding this could be difficulty in retrieving the data from SSD, as users would need to go dig up from their backups and “will be required in non-fault tolerance modes (e.g., RAID 0) and in fault tolerance RAID mode if more drives fail than what is supported by the fault tolerance RAID mode logical drive [e.g. RAID 5 logical drive with two failed SSDs].” as per HPE. This was actually revealed by an SSD manufacturer to HPE, who would have put all these vulnerable drives at once to service, causing all of them to stop in October 2020. Avoiding this is just by upgrading to the new firmware, which was available for VMware ESXI, Linux and Windows by flashing online. Source: HPE
