Symptoms
The drive will report a large number of bad blocks. This can be seen as a SCSI sense 03/11 error being reported, or the drive may be pre-emptively failed.
Cause
Toshiba confirmed that due to a firmware issue the Skip Track Erase (STE) refresh was not effective in certain areas of the drive, resulting in vulnerable areas. This ultimately results in unrecovered read errors.
Resolution
Update the drive firmware to version EJ09 or greater to improve drive resiliency and reduce failures. See the following Knowledgebase articles for more information on upgrading the firmware:PowerVault ME4:PowerVault ME4: A disk firmware update is available for your systemPowerVault ME5:ME5: Information Alert - controller or disk updates are availablePowerEdge:Updating Firmware and Drivers on Dell PowerEdge Servers
