CRITICAL: Seagate 1200 SSD Firmware Update Required for 2012 R2 Storage Spaces

We got hit with this today:

• Get-PhysicalDisk

Since this was our second run at standing up this Scale-Out File Server cluster with things not working as expected we began to dig in.

During a Space creation process the symptom of the Volume Format phase hitting an error happened. We jumped into PowerShell to poll the disks right then and saw the above.

The Disks:

• Get-PhysicalDisk | where MediaType -eq SSD | ft Model,FirmwareVersion -AutoSize

The PowerShell to get the above information along with the serial numbers:

• Get-PhysicalDisk | where MediaType -eq SSD | ft Model,FirmwareVersion,SerialNumber -AutoSize

Go to Seagate's Support site and choose the Download Finder.

Enter the serial number, just the first set of digits before the four 0000 pattern as the number was repeated twice for us, your country, and then under Certificate click on the Click here link and _not_ the Email Me link.

The highlighted link downloads the actual firmware ZIP file.

A copy of Seagate's SeaTools is required to update the drive's firmware.

If the SSDs are in a cluster setting, as they are here, make sure to properly drain the nodes and shut down the cluster (TechNet). Then shut down all nodes but one.

Run the firmware update and reboot that node. Bring the Cluster back online and fire up the other nodes one by one.

NOTE: We have _not_ tested this firmware yet.

A Microsoft Forum post brought us into the right direction: Clustered Storage space degraded and SSD disks "starting".

Remember how it has been mentioned ad nauseam on this blog about how we are very careful about testing our deployments? Well, in this case we were a part of the planning phases for this cluster but did not have access to these particular SSDs prior to deploying in a Michigan Data Centre.

This situation sure brings home the point that we _always_ need to test our setups before deploying them at client sites or on behalf of our clients.

EDIT: Brain was five steps ahead of fingers so the "Firmware Update" in the title never made it into the original post! :)

Philip Elder
Microsoft Cluster MVP
MPECS Inc.
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen ASP Project
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