First let me say thanks to Mike for posting to the blog the last 2 days. He did a great job!

If you are a current ZPA (Zerowait Parts Assurance) customer, you have, or will, receive an email from Zerowait with this advisory message.

Outdated disk firmware can lead to premature disk failures and other
issues, such as drives reporting as “broken” or “failed” when in reality they are not. Instead, they are being affected by one or more known bugs. Most of the known bugs have been fixed in the newer versions of firmware. Therefore, to minimize potential drive issues and improve drive reliability, Zerowait recommends maintaining your system on the latest available drive firmware.

The message will also have a list of your current discs, the up to date firmware revision number, and instructions for what to do.

The reason for this advisory message is that Zerowait has been getting numerous reports of bad drives. After down time and effort to replace the drive, it is determined that the drive itself is not bad, it just has outdated firmware. Consider this proceedure like a flu shot, no one likes to get them but the shot is better than the flu; no one likes to take the time to update the firmware of their drives, but a little time spent updating is better than down time replacing drives that aren’t really bad.

If you would like more help with this, call Zerowait.