Greetings all,
I have something of an odd request: does anyone have an recent firmware
file for an HGST HUH728080ALE604 (8 TB SATA 512e) hard drive?
The existing firmware is A4GNW907. Dell distributes a patch for exactly
the same HUH728080ALE604 product ID, firmware called WE70GP46. I have
this file, but after unsucessfully trying to flash it for a week all I
managed to do is brick my spare.
Symptom is that the drives power up just fine. I can mount the
filesystem. Everything works, but only for ~28 minutes. After that,
five of the 16 drives in my RAID6 array go offline within miliseconds of
each other. No media errors, but rather every command rsults in random,
nonsensical messages. The Dell patch mentions a "pointer error" in the
usage log. After another cold restart I get another ~28 min, etc.
Doesn't matter if I move the drives to another computer either. They
still lose their mind after 28 min of power-on time. And 28 min is not
enough to even list my 60 million files or copy 70 TB to somewhere else.
Yes, I have backups, but I was in the middle of a lot of things when it
went down.
HGST got bought out by Western Digital years ago, I reached out of
course, and they were happy to provide me with the program for flashing
the firmware, but not the firmware itself. Yes, that's right. I can have
the software but not the firmware. Said my drives are "out of warranty".
I was absolutely gobsmacked by this. There is a fix. Dell has it. But WD
just won't provide it. And here I always thought that if a product is
out of warranty you were allowed to try and break it. They seem to have
a remarkably draconian policy on firmware now.
So, public service message: if any of you out there have HGST 8 TB
drives (or, IMHO any Western Digital product), I recommend you replace
it with a competing product right away.
But I digress. If anyone knows how to fix this problem I would love to
hear from you. On or off-list is fine.
Thank you for reading this far into my rant,
-James Holton
MAD Scientist
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1
This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a mailing list
hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
