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RDD / Every kind of member drive / Dell, HPE and Lenovo-branded

Dell DP/N · HPE SmartDrive · Lenovo FRU · D417 · HPD8 · uncertified · not authenticated

Dell, HPE and Lenovo-branded drives. An ordinary drive with a vendor's firmware, a part number, a carrier, and opinions about other hosts.

Dell, HPE and Lenovo do not make hard drives. They buy Seagate, WD, Toshiba and SanDisk drives, load their own firmware, print their own part number over the maker's, fit a carrier with their own LEDs, and sell the result with a support contract. The firmware is where the difference lives: Dell's revisions begin with D and HPE's with HPD, a PERC flags any drive without Dell firmware as uncertified and a Smart Array refuses to authenticate one without HPE's, and both vendors have shipped firmware with a clock in it: HPE's SAS SSDs failed at 32,768 and 40,000 hours, Dell's at 40,000. On the bench they are the drives underneath, imaged as a Seagate or a Toshiba would be, with one practical difference: when they fail under contract, the engineer takes them away. One branded member imaged is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench.

Free first lookOne fixed figure in writingNo data, no bill on most jobsReturn postage paid

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668

Power down. Label every slot before a drive comes out. Do not rebuild while a second drive is flagged. Do not clear or import a foreign configuration. Do not initialise, reformat or PSID-revert anything. A rebuild reads every sector of every surviving member, and on a set whose drives were bought together it is where the second failure is found. Nothing on the drives gets worse while the server is off.

Branded drive symptoms, and what each means.

Not listed? Describe it on the form →
Predictive failure on a Dell or HPE driveThe drive crossed its thresholds. Replace on a healthy set; image first on a degraded one.Everyday job
Uncertified / not authenticated after a replacementThe replacement lacks vendor firmware. A warning, not a failure.Everyday job
SSDs failing together at a round number of hoursThe firmware clock. Stop; check the survivors' hours.Do not delay
Locked after a PERC or Smart Array swapA SED whose key stayed behind. Find it.Do not delay
Engineer wants the failed driveKeep it until you have its data, or have a retention contract.Do not delay
Amber LED on the carrierFault or predictive failure, by pattern. Photograph it.Everyday job
Packing it and posting it: power the server or shelf down, write the slot number on each drive with a marker before it comes out of its carrier, and keep it in the carrier. Send every member from the set where the set is the job, or the one failed member where the set is healthy and you want it imaged for the rebuild. Each drive travels in an anti-static bag inside its own padding, in a box with nothing able to move. Send the controller only if we ask for it. Insure the parcel for what the data is worth rather than the price of the drives, and use a tracked service. The posting address is not printed anywhere on this site; it arrives by email in reply to the form, with a booking sheet to print; the sheet inside the parcel is what matches it to your enquiry when it is opened. Or hand the sealed parcel in at the nearest of ten drop-off points, your name on the outside and the sheet inside; say where you are on the form and it comes by email. We pay the postage home either way. The whole of it is written up on the guide to packing and posting.

Where it lives, and what fails.

Vendor firmwareThe same ST1200MM0088 runs Seagate, Dell or HPE firmware, and only the vendor's version satisfies the vendor's controller. The bench reads the drive on its own terms; the firmware revision is recorded because the clock bugs live in it.
The clocksHPE a00092491: SAS SSDs fail at 32,768 hours before HPD8 (November 2019). HPE a00097382: another line at 40,000 hours before HPD7 (March 2020). Dell KB 000177640: LT-series SAS SSDs at 40,000 hours before D417, reporting 0 GB after. HPE has also published bulletins for hard drives at 65,536 hours and NVMe drives at 4,700.
Carriers and LEDsDell carriers show green, amber and a green-amber-off pattern for predicted failure; HPE SmartDrive carriers add a blue locate light and a do-not-remove indicator. Photograph the carrier before the drive comes out; the pattern is part of the case.
The warranty courierUnder a standard contract the failed drive is returned to the vendor. Dell's Keep Your Hard Drive and HPE's defective media retention options let you keep it. If your data is on that drive, it should come here before it goes anywhere.

Model strings, and what they tell us.

Describe yours to us →
Model string What it is What it means on the bench
Dell DP/N 9HXK6HUH721212AL5200 with Dell firmwareRead as an HGST HC520
HPE 861686-B21 (verify)An HPE midline SAS drive kitRead as the underlying model
Firmware D417Dell's fix for the 40,000-hour LT-series failureDrives before it fail on schedule
Firmware HPD8 / HPD7HPE's fixes for the 32,768 and 40,000-hour failuresAs above
Lenovo FRU 00YK012 (example)ThinkSystem SAS driveStandard mechanics; FRU on the label

From the parcel arriving to your files going back.

Work we have closed →
01

Logged the day it lands, and the first look costs nothing Free

A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. An engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins: the interface, the sector format, the firmware, the security state, and what the controller was saying when it stopped. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.

Nothing to pay for lookingA single figure, put in writingNo rebuilds, no imports, no resets
02

The drive on its own bench

A member drive is read on the equipment its interface needs: a SAS imager for SAS and NL-SAS, a SATA imager for enterprise SATA, a terminated SCSI or Fibre Channel controller for the legacy drives, a PCIe adaptor for NVMe. It is never put back in a server, and never in a controller that will try to rebuild. Drives that answer at full speed are imaged; drives with weak or failed heads go to the clean bench, where matched donors are fitted and the service area repaired before a sector is read.

Read at its native interfaceFailing heads to the clean bench
03

Imaged once, at its native sector size

Every drive is imaged sector by sector, head by head where it needs it, with the bad areas last. Drives with 520- or 528-byte sectors are imaged as they are and the extra bytes stripped from the image, never the drive. Self-encrypting drives are unlocked on the imager with the key you supply. From then on the originals are not touched again.

Head by head, weak areas lastNative sector size preserved
04

The image, and the set

Where the set is healthy and one member was the job, the image goes back to you on a fresh drive, sector-identical, ready to rebuild from. Where the set is the job, every member is imaged and the array reassembled in software from the images: order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point read from the drives' own metadata, the file system repaired on the virtual volume, never on the originals. The array work is covered in full on our RAID array site, and it happens on the same bench.

One member: a sector-identical image on fresh mediaA set: reassembled in software from the images
05

You see the file list before you pay

What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.

No charge until you accept the figureFresh media, supplied with the job3–4 days at the bench

What arrives most often

  • Keep the failed drive. The engineer's replacement rebuilds the set; the failed drive holds the copy you may need if the rebuild fails.
  • Write the slot and the LED pattern on the sheet. Vendor controllers log both, and the bench reads the log.
  • Export the controller log before the server is touched: OpenManage, iDRAC, iLO or SSA. It is the best record of what failed when.
  • Check the firmware revision and the hours on every survivor when an SSD fails. Drives fitted together fail together.

One job, followed all the way through.

UK · RDD-2026-0550JOB LOGGED ✓

A Dell-firmware ST600MM0006 from a PowerEdge R720 in RAID 10, the mirror partner also predictive, and a ProSupport engineer booked for the afternoon

The owner asked the engineer to wait. Both drives came here in their carriers: the failed one had a head swap on the clean bench and was imaged on the SAS imager; the predictive one was imaged with its weak areas last. Both images went back on fresh drives, and the engineer's replacements went into a set that had already been made whole.

100% of both members recovered5 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

What helps, and what harms.

Do this much first

  • Keep the failed drive until you have its data
  • Export the controller log
  • Send the drive in its carrier with the slot written on it
  • Tell us the firmware revision and the vendor

What sets us back

  • Handing the failed drive to the courier first
  • Clearing a foreign configuration after a controller swap
  • Updating firmware on failed SSDs
  • Rebuilding while the mirror partner is predictive

Questions answered before you commit.

Does Dell or HPE recover data from server drives?

Not as a service we could find. Dell withdrew its hard drive data recovery service in 2022, and it only ever covered client PCs. Both offer drive retention contracts so you can keep the failed drive; the recovery is done here.

The engineer wants to take the failed drive. Should I let him?

Not until you have its data, or you are sure you do not need it. Under Dell's Keep Your Hard Drive or HPE's retention options you can keep it.

Why exactly 32,768 hours?

It is two to the power fifteen. A counter that overflowed at that number is the usual suspect, though HPE never said.

What does it cost?

£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing; sets from £500 + VAT.

How long does it take?

3–4 days at the bench for one drive; 5–10 days at the bench for a set.

Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.

Dell-branded drives →HPE-branded drives →Lenovo / IBM-branded drives →SSDs failed at 32,768 or 40,000 hours →

Nothing gets worse while it is powered down.

Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.

0800 6890668

Price my jobPacking and posting