I just bought three 3TB SATA drives(628059-B21) installed them set up a RAID 5 and got my volumes set up and put some data on them. Everthing looked good until I rebooted when it suddenly became Christmas on the face panel and all three of the drives indicated failure. ACU corroborates with a imminent SMART failure alert. Hunted business support and found critical FW update for controller, saw many criticals for the drive (MB3000EBKAB). Applied HPG6. Unfortunately even after doing both online firmware flashes the drives still fail on power up. (drives originally had HPG2 FW)
There were some comments about needing a full poweroff after the firmware update so I turned it off and unplugged it for about two minutes. Powered it up with fingers crosse but nothing changed.
Quite a number of hours have gone into backing up, reconfiguring existing RAIDs, and of course setting up the new drives/volumes. Falling back is at least a days work (not to mention the lost time setting it up).
Any ideas out there ?
I started on the HP support site, but as far as I can tell if you buy HP parts you can't get support directly form HP even when in warranty (the invoice date on this is 6 days ago). I contacted my vendor, but I feel like I am going blind after searching for some way to contact HP support directly. If anyone reading works for HP all I can say is congratulations, Compaq and DEC both had excellent support/service which I used for years and years, HP buys both and support goes straight to the crapper. You can't even send an email without dancing through five or six pages of sdearch forms none of which include parts.. It used to be that even without a contract you could call and using the part serial number they could determine if in warranty, Irealize this costs money to do, but with such a gap in the service structure I may have to defect to Dell after over a decade of prefering Compaq.
My opinion.. Support ? What support ?