HGST HUH721010AL5200 firmware

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n0xlf

New Member
Nov 5, 2018
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I have been so frustrated by HGST's unwillingness to provide firmware for these drives that I wanted to share both the firmware and my experience that lead me to the update so that this can be added to the Google universe.

I have two Synology RC18015xs+ servers (high availability) with 12x HUH721010AL5200 in an RXD1215sas. This configuration worked for years until recently the drives started showing delayed ECC reads:

Code:
Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0   170357         0    170357   13436815     590624.886           0
write:         0        0         0         0     640515      47190.265           0
verify:        0        0         0         0    1545917          0.000           0
With firmware A21D, those delayed reads would cause the RXD1215sas to hang and HA would kick in, causing the servers to flap back and forth, thinking they had gone down. If I powered off the backup server that would solve the problem and just result in a momentary hang:

Code:
[27690.768212] sd 6:0:10:0: attempting task abort! scmd(ffff880133577cc0)
[27690.774740] sd 6:0:10:0: [sas11] CDB:
[27690.778481] cdb[0]=0x4d: 4d 00 4d 00 00 00 00 00 10 00
[27690.783761] scsi target6:0:10: handle(0x0014), sas_address(0x5000cca25110a1f5), phy(18)
[27690.791747] scsi target6:0:10: enclosure_logical_id(0x5001132f000d2bff), slot(0)
[27690.799152] sd 6:0:10:0: task abort: SUCCESS scmd(ffff880133577cc0)
All of this has resulted in many hours of frustration, and the replacement of 5 of my 12 drives. Thankfully I kept the 5 "bad" ones.

From the start I was fairly convinced that this was a firmware issue because the drives didn't show any grown defects. Now, I can't answer why the older drives are having delayed ECC reads vs none on newer drives, but I can say that the latest firmware of A92D seems to have corrected the timeouts while the ECC correction is taking place.

Here is the firmware and the associated flashing utilities they provided: HGST.rar

I found it easier (in Linux on Synology at least) to use SG3 utils: The sg3_utils package

And flash with: ./sg_write_buffer -m 5 -vvvvv -I LHGNA92C.bin /dev/sgX

I flashed all 17 of my drives and put the worst "bad" one back on the array to test. It has been slowly increasing the delayed ECC reads but I haven't experienced any issues with the rebuild or related performance.

Hope this helps someone!
 

bandit8623

Member
May 25, 2021
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I have 4 HUH721010AL4204 drives and i have 2 HUH721010AL5200 formatted the
to 4k so they matched the others in a raid 5 array. i havent had any problems but usually the newer firmware does fix lingering probs. can i ask where u ended up getting the newest firm? my HUH721010AL4204 have c386 firm and i cant figure out updates for them.

you mentioned A92D your package has A92C as latest.
 
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n0xlf

New Member
Nov 5, 2018
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If you aren't having problems with the drives causing your RAID to hang, I probably wouldn't mess with them too much. The firmware I posted is specific to the 5200 and not the 4204, which is slightly different:

1629344293930.png

The firmware came straight from HGST - It was just difficult to actually get it out of them for whatever reason.

Edit: As a side note, my drives have performed perfectly ever since this update.
 

bandit8623

Member
May 25, 2021
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If you aren't having problems with the drives causing your RAID to hang, I probably wouldn't mess with them too much. The firmware I posted is specific to the 5200 and not the 4204, which is slightly different:

View attachment 19538

The firmware came straight from HGST - It was just difficult to actually get it out of them for whatever reason.

Edit: As a side note, my drives have performed perfectly ever since this update.
i updated my 2 5200 drives and it fixed how the lights were blinking on my lsi controller. (very different from the 4204's) havent had much other testing yet. the firmware isnt compatible with the 4202's anyway. i used hugo to update the 5200's was nice it didnt care if behind a raid controller. most other tools require the drives being on an hba.

my only reason to update my 4204's is 1 drive of the 4 has a much lower firmware level. and that drive had fallen out of sync once before. (rebuild) been good again for awhile but would be nice to have the latest on all, or at least the same. i cant find any info on this C firmware they have.

thx for your post
 

ZFSZealot

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Aug 16, 2021
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My experience is, if you open a ticket with WDC, and make it clear that you both know what you're doing and accept full responsibility for any screw-ups, they will get you firmware after a few days. Ask a Question | WD Support. I also included as many serial numbers as I could in the web form - hoping that showing a substantial population would show I wasn't just home gaming (over 200 HGST drives at work)
 
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bandit8623

Member
May 25, 2021
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My experience is, if you open a ticket with WDC, and make it clear that you both know what you're doing and accept full responsibility for any screw-ups, they will get you firmware after a few days. Ask a Question | WD Support. I also included as many serial numbers as I could in the web form - hoping that showing a substantial population would show I wasn't just home gaming (over 200 HGST drives at work)
i tried a while back, but the firmware is oem and they wouldnt help me since they were oem drives. they dont say what oem they are from on the drives . maybe ill try again one of these days
 

ZFSZealot

New Member
Aug 16, 2021
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i tried a while back, but the firmware is oem and they wouldnt help me since they were oem drives. they dont say what oem they are from on the drives . maybe ill try again one of these days
Agreed, that makes it a whole lot harder. You might try looking up the part number. For example, I have a population of HUS156060VLS600 drives, all with part number 0B23663. Those are actual vanilla HGST drives. I also have other HUS156060VLS600 drives with part number 0B24502, and those are NetApp OEM drives. At least with HGST, the part number seems to be the key - if I search for 0B24502 on eBay, it's fairly clear based on the results that this made by HGST for NetApp.
 

bandit8623

Member
May 25, 2021
63
19
8
Agreed, that makes it a whole lot harder. You might try looking up the part number. For example, I have a population of HUS156060VLS600 drives, all with part number 0B23663. Those are actual vanilla HGST drives. I also have other HUS156060VLS600 drives with part number 0B24502, and those are NetApp OEM drives. At least with HGST, the part number seems to be the key - if I search for 0B24502 on eBay, it's fairly clear based on the results that this made by HGST for NetApp.

C firmware is for the 5204 and 4204 drives
A firmware is for the 5200 and 4200 drives

new firmware for your 5200 drives. i did end up finding firmware for my 4204 drives as well. firmware is from this march of 2022

and after matching all firmware on my drives i saw 50% increase in speed. love hugo as you can update behind an lsi raid controller.
example
(hugo) update -m HUH721010AL5200 -f fimrware.bin

:) cheers
 
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