HPE has issued a firmware fix to stop certain SAS SSDs crashing at 32,768 hours of operation.

The HPE customer bulletin, dated 19 November, says SSD Firmware Version HPD8 is a critical fix. If it is not applied the drive will fail at 32,768 hours operating time, meaning 3 years, 270 days 8 hours, and data on the drive will be lost.

Interestingly the maximum integer value storable in 16 bits is 32,768.

The company said in a statement: “A supplier notified HPE on 11/15 of a manufacturer firmware defect in certain solid state drives used in select HPE server and storage products. HPE immediately began working around the clock to develop a firmware update that will fix the defect. We are currently notifying customers of the need to install this update as soon as possible. Helping our customers to remediate this issue is our highest priority.”

Affected HPE systems include ProLiant servers, Synergy, Apollo, JBOD D3xxx, D6xxx, D8xxx, MSA and StoreVirtual 3200 arrays. 3PAR, Nimble and Primera arrays are not affected. The affected drives’ firmware should be updated immediately.

A series of HPE SSD SKUs are listed in HPE’s bulletin. These are all 2.5-inch, 12Gbit/s SAS SSDs with capacities of 400GB, 800GB, 1.6TB and 3.2TB. A second set of capacities are 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB, 7.68TB and 15.3TB.

To us this looks like a single SSD family with read-intensive and longer life models is affected. HPE is not identifying the supplier.