Hard Drive HPB4 vs HPB9 firmware

[Adam Olejniczak]

Hello,

I have following problem.

Few times we noticed that our HPs, with 6402 (v2.58) controllers connected to MSA30s noticed hard drive failures.

What interesting that those were multiple (2-3 disks) failures in time period of 30 minutes.

All drives were are getting from HP and using are 289243-001 with HPB4 firmware.

I did run test on those drives again, with different controller in different server and those drives failed again.

Then I flashed drives to HPB9A firmware, and did run same test again. Drives that fail previously works fine now.

I tested it in RAID10, and RAID 0 (one drive = one LUN).

Questions I have are:

1. Is there actually some fix in HPB9 in compare to HPB4 that prevents drives from reporting as bad?

2. Is the act of flashing drive in in itself fixing the drives? (ie. if I would reflash them with HPB4 will they be fine too?)

3. Is HPB9 compatible with 2.58 of 6402s? Maybe drives are not reporting failures because HPB9 can not report to 2.58 controller?

If anyone have any experience in this area I would be most grateful for help.

Thanks!

[e4services]

Unfortunately, HP attempts at changing the manufacturers Firmware to suit their backwards compatibity has just got them in trouble. You are probebly correct in assuming that errors in the firmware cause the controller to mark the drive as failing when truely it is not. And no, changing the firmware would not have corrected a bad situation. It could be that so treashold the old firmware had for some SMART perameter was set to low for a certin manufacturers drive.