The issue affects SSDs with an HPE firmware version prior to HPD8 that results in SSD failure at 32,768 hours of operation (i.e., 3 years, 270 days 8 hours). After the SSD failure occurs, neither the SSD nor the data can be recovered. In addition, SSDs which were put into service at the same time will likely fail nearly simultaneously.
Looks like some sort of run time stored in a signed 2 byte integer. Oops.
But how does that brick the device? I guess the hour counter overflows, goes negative and that screws up a calculation later on, causing the firmware to crash (over and over again..)
If only SSD vendors would do the usual cost-cutting measure of loading firmware from the host computer, this could be trivially fixed.
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Looks like some sort of run time stored in a signed 2 byte integer. Oops.
It's probably the SMART "hours of operation" field. I see no reason for anything else to be stored in units of hours instead of seconds.
Yes, this means that a field meant for diagnosing failures was responsible for a failure. Oops.
But how does that brick the device? I guess the hour counter overflows, goes negative and that screws up a calculation later on, causing the firmware to crash (over and over again..)
If only SSD vendors would do the usual cost-cutting measure of loading firmware from the host computer, this could be trivially fixed.
Please no. I may actually want to boot from one of those devices.
Somewhere in the UEFI kitchensink there certainly is firmware loading support already.
What do you mean? The fix is to load a firmware update from the host computer.
Not once you are past 32768 hours, apparently.
Usually the SMART counter just wraps around back to 0. In this case it becomes negative because it was read as a signed short.