Unexpected Disk Failure on AFF A250 – What Could Be the Cause?

[NoahGreen]

Hi everyone,

I’m running an AFF A250 system, and recently, one of the SSDs failed unexpectedly. The system flagged it as failed, but there were no prior warning signs in the logs. Other drives in the same aggregate seem fine, and performance hasn’t been impacted yet.

I’ve checked for any firmware updates and ran a basic health check, but I’m wondering what else I should look into. Could this be an isolated hardware failure, or is there a chance something like high write cycles or a controller issue might be contributing?

Thanks in advance!

[andris · Accepted solution]

As the old saying goes... "drives can fail... stuff happens."

Keep all of your drive and shelf firmware up-to-date for best reliability and resiliency of your storage subsystem. For internal drives in the AFF A250, you'll want to keep up-to-date with ONTAP (See Support Bulletin SU2)

https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/downloads/firmware/disk-drive-firmware

https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/downloads/firmware/disk-shelf-firmware

[NoahGreen]

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@andris wrote:

As the old saying goes... "drives can fail... stuff happens."

Keep all of your drive and shelf firmware up-to-date for best reliability and resiliency of your storage subsystem. For internal drives in the AFF A250, you'll want to keep up-to-date with ONTAP (See Support Bulletin SU2)

https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/downloads/firmware/disk-drive-firmware

https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/downloads/firmware/disk-shelf-firmware

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I agree, sometimes drive failures can just happen without warning, even in well-maintained systems. I’ve already started reviewing the firmware status using the links you shared and will double-check ONTAP is fully up to date as well.

So far, no signs of any controller or shelf-level issues, but I’ll keep monitoring the logs and maybe run an extended diagnostic just to be sure there’s no underlying hardware stress.