MSA1040 - Age of HDD's

[JanKoster]

Hello,
I have a question. My company has about 14 HP MSA 1040's with a minimum of 12 HDDs each.
After doing an inventory, I noticed that most HHDs have a count of over 44,000 hours, which is normal for their age. But some HDDs (about 10 pieces) have less than 500 hours, which is only 3 weeks old.
How is this possible? All our HDDs last more than 4 years end are NOT replaced by new ones.
Second question. What is a normal age for this kind of HDD? (600GB SAS)
Thanks for any response.

[support_s]

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1. Notice: HPE MSA 2052, 2050, 2042, 2040, 1050, 1040, and P2000 G3 - SAN Storage - Hard Disk Drive End-Of-Life Announcement

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[ArunKKR · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Please note that MSA 1040 is an end of support life product.
The incorrect power on hours reporting could be due to older version firmware or a firmware bug.
Having said that I haven't come across any issues with regard to incorrect power on hours reporting in MSA G4 arrays till now.
You might need to check the individual hard drive vendor MTBF data to find the average drive age.
Each drive would have a hard drive vendor sticker on it apart from HPE part number sticker.
The maximum standard warranty that I could see for MSA drives is 3 years.

[JonPaul]

@JanKoster 
Does the number of power on hours track to a specific model of drive?
Spinning media 10k/15k drives from HPE typically have a 3 year warranty.  That is a clue on how long until drives start increasing in failure rate.
In my experience, and not in any way talking for HPE in this statement, once you get past a couple of years of service spinning drives tend to just keep spinning. Issues occur when they stop (intentionally or unexpectedly) and have to restart.  As the storage gets older and older you will want to make sure that your backup strategy is solid.
As @ArunKKR  stated, the Gen4 MSA arrays are at or near End of Support Life.  You hopefully have had a 5+ year happy experience with them and it's probably time to look and prepare for what is next.  The latest Gen6 MSAs have been shipping since late 2020 and are much faster that the Gen depending on your application you may be able to replace multiple 1040 with a single 2060.