Some HP Hard Drives Will Stop Working After 32,768 Hours of Use

When you get some kind of a hard drive, you expect to be able to continuously use that drive for about five years. This is a reasonable amount of time to make it seem like you are getting your money’s worth as far as your usage of this particular piece of hardware is concerned. However, what you might not realize is that while most hardware manufacturers are going to give you a five year guarantee, there are some out there that would not be giving you quite the same amount of time when it comes to ensuring that the product would last.

A big example of this is Hewlett-Packard, a company that released a firmware update meant to prevent its hard drives, particularly its SSDs, from failing after being used for exactly 32,768 hours. This comes up to about 3 years and 270 days which is obviously far shorter than the five years that you might be expecting when you use a product of this sort.

One thing that you might find to be particularly concerning is that these hard drives are generally used for enterprise which means that quite a few companies probably store a fair amount of important data on them. Since the bug would make the data on the hard drive unrecoverable, this could potentially end up causing untold damage to a lot of companies that might be relying on this data for a wide variety of reasons all in all.

There are about twenty different types of drives that are being affected by this issue, and so far HP has only released fixes for about eight of them thereby making it absolutely essential that the company tries its best to fix the issue as quickly as possible before valuable data ends up being lost forever.


Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Read next: 24 Percent of Global Users Say They Just Don't Understand Computers and New Technology