Upgrade HGST SAS firmware on Dell R710 RAID 1

[bandit1216]

Hi, first post, hope this is the right forum.

So I bought a couple of HGST s840 drives mentioned in this thread. The drives need a firmware update and I managed to obtain the upgrade files from the HGST website.

I stupidly installed the OS on these drives when I got them, so updating the firmware is a little trickier as the drives have to be completely wiped. I have them in a Dell R710 Perc 6/i controller (on the latest firmware) in a RAID 1. I was hoping I could remove each drive from the array one at a time, wipe it, then apply the latest firmware, all without taking the server down. I haven't messed around with this RAID controller a whole lot, but it looks like I can set a disk as offline in OpenManage, create a new RAID 0 array, format, apply firmware, set to offline again, then recombine with the OS array, rinse and repeat?

Anyway, was hoping someone on here has done this before; I searched high and low on this forum and online and didn't find anything resembling my issue. Just for context, this is a home server that gets a bare-metal backup nightly, so a nuke and reinstall is an option. I'd just rather avoid that as I run several server 2016 VMs (around 1 TB) and and complete reinstall would likely take all day. Appreciate any help!

 

[WANg]

Eh, the mirror rebuild time on the RAID will probably be so long that it's probably not worth doing it one drive at a time. Clone out the virtual drive via clonezilla/ghost and then just take the whole damn array down, then image it back in once you are done. There's no saying that the firmware will be accepted by the drive for flashing, and there's no guarantee the firmware install will be successful, so you are really better off just blowing it away to be on the safe side.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

If this is indeed a RAID1 of two drives then rebuild time from one to the other should be very quick - basically the max sequential write speed that the drives or controller supports.

Assuming you don't want to reinstall/restore and you've got another chassis to do the firmware upgrade in, you could do this relatively seamlessly by:
Removing drive A from the RAID array
Update firmware on drive A somewhere else
Add drive A back to the RAID array and wait for rebuild
Repeat for drive B

If the HGST firmware tool is able to work within the OS without needing a reboot or controller reset (I'm not familiar with the HGST firmware tools), you wouldn't even need a separate chassis although I'd still recommend always doing firmware updates on standalone hardware where possible because it's still risky. And of course always be prepared to need to restore from backup in case the new firmware has gremlins.

 

[bandit1216]

Sorry for the late update, I ended up reinstalling the OS on a separate drive to apply the firmware updates. It took a few different tries with different versions of the HDM program and I got one of the drives updated. Unfortunately the other didn't take the firmware and threw some kind of command error code (neglected to get a screenshot gah!) and now the drive is showing failed and not responding to any commands. Rebooted the server and swapped the drive to a different slot but looks like it's bricked. Currently working with HGST support but I think the only option is an RMA which doesn't look possible on a drive this old and it being used. Maybe I'll post on the hard drive sub and see if anyone has any tricks for fixing it.