SanDisk SSD’s 40,000-Hours Death Bug 2023 Resurrection Threatens Enterprises

You might recollect that in March 2020, a severe SanDisk SSD’s 40,000-hours death bug threatened the data integrity of SanDisk SSD users. The issue was reported first by the users with servers based on the SanDisk SSDs. Many RAID array users too joined the league of victims soon.

One of the popular sites, Hacker News, reported it again when the site went down on Friday, July 8, 2023. The site owners tackled the situation by shifting to another server and confirmed the same via the discussions on their page.

What is the SanDisk SSD 40,000 Death Bug?

The SSD 40000 hours death bug is a manufacturer firmware defect in SanDisk SAS SSDs. Dell and HPE identified the issue for the first time in 2020 and warned their users against the threat.

The official statement in 2020 by Western Digital, the manufacturer and owner of SanDisk, acknowledged the firmware issue in SAS SSD. But, they didn’t share any concrete detail and directed the whole thing toward the responsible OEM.

The SanDisk SSD’s Death Bug renders the SSDs with 200 GB to 1.6 TB capacity unusable after 40,000 hours of usage, which is approximately 4 years and 206 days. So, it might not be an imminent danger to users who have recently started using the drives for their servers or RAID arrays. However, if not dealt with on time, the bug results in complete SSD failure, with all the data lost beyond the scope of recovery.

Dell and HP Enterprise released a firmware update in 2020, but it’s not clear whether this update tackles the latest reappearance of SanDisk SSD’s 40,000-hours Death Bug.

What can you do?

The most recent victim Hacker News reported “HN is down again with what appears to be a second disk failure. This is on the fallback server, which we switched to last night when the primary server failed.” and they had to switch to their rarely used backups to bring the site online.

Apparently, you can do nothing more than rely on the backups you’ve created for failsafe operations of your server. However, if you’ve been taking those backups on the same SSDs, it is better to immediately start creating a backup of those too on a different SSD or other storage media.

None of the stakeholders has issued an official statement, fixes, or updates, but it’s better to be on the safer side than to lose valuable data. If your SSD is still in a working condition, you may try to update it using the 2020 Dell updates or HPE updates, depending on your SSD provider, to resolve this death bug.

We suggest you run the Stellar Drive Monitor on your SSD, and if you haven’t yet taken a backup of your data, it’s high time you do it. The drive monitor can help you get real-time information on your SSD’s health, temperature, and performance. Moreover, you can also scan your drive for bad sectors and clone the drive if need be. The drive monitor alerts you with warnings if it senses any issue with your SSD.

If your SSD has already failed, you can go for the Stellar Data Recovery Lab-Services. This hi-tech facility is equipped with the latest and innovative tools. The highly experienced and skilled professionals handle your SSD to retrieve every bit of recoverable data. Data recovery through the lab services is a hassle-free 4-step procedure.

1. Free phone consultation.
2. Analysis of the SSD drive from which you need to recover data.
3. Data recovery procedure by our experts.
4. Data verification and secure door-step delivery.

That is all the information available on the issue for now. However, stay connected as we are keeping a vigilant eye on the latest developments. We will keep you posted and share the updates as soon as Western Digital or any other stakeholder officially releases it.

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About The Author

Ashutosh Kumar

Ashutosh is a Senior Content Writer at Stellar with over 8 years of experience in data recovery, IoT, and AI technologies domain. He is a tech enthusiast who enjoys researching and sharing DIY solutions to resolve complex technical issues. Apart from professional writing Ashutosh is a published poet and spends his weekends building small gadgets.