51–60 of 131 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likely. It would be very inconvenient, but I could pull it off on my home's desktop computer. Now consider doing this at scale, in a datacenter, or just some office that has a lot of these drives. Ouch.
It also raises concerns about trust. What if I don't trust proprietary Windows and don't want to run it? It can potentially compromise my SSD during the update.
Is there any significant benefit of updating firmware? Intuitively it seems like the risk/reward is very skewed towards not doing it. I've never really updated the firmware on any component other than routers or motherboard/bios.
Hard drive, and SSD firmwares have had massive issues in the past, including ones causing major filesystem corruption and data loss. There was even once a bug which, after X hours of SMART recorded usage, would cause the SSD to lockup every hour thereafter: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/oh18a/attention_c... SSD firmware issues can be very serious.
Reminds me when about ten years ago, working in an all-Linux company there was an issue with some Lenovo docking stations. I don't recall anymore what the issue was exactly, just that something wouldn't work properly when you plugged in a laptop with Linux. The problem was solved by a firmware upgrade, but upgrading the docking station firmware was possible only from Windows. So there was this one poor person in IT w…
A year later the drive developed some bad sectors. It was still under warranty so qualified for a free replacement. All I needed to do was get an RMA number and ship the drive to them.
But to get an RMA number you had to run their diagnostic software which, if it decided the drive really did have a problem, would issue the RMA number.
That diagnostic software was Windows only.
I ended up temporarily moving the drive to my Windows gaming box to run the diagnostic. I'm not sure what would have happened if I had been a purely MacOS and Linux household.
This is unfortunate. Can't do simple things easily, or at all, unless you boot windows. My mouse looked like Christmas tree until I installed some electron app on windows. There has to be a better way without the need to hack everything
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/samsung_magician-consumer...
There's still a better way where they do think so — "enterprise" SSDs:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/samsung-ssd-dc-toolkit
Vote with your pocket, support vendors that do care.
This is some insanity that shouldn't be needed, when fwupd[0] exists. Samsung is to blame for this. [0]: https://fwupd.org/
I had run into the same problem with Kingston - no firmware on the web, update tool only for Windows. Had to ask local distributor to contact Kingston and ask for firmware. I was lucky to get it, but never bought another Kingston drive. I don't understand how datacenter SSD manufacturer can so blatantly ignore Linux.
If you mean Sammy, they do provide support for datacenter SSDs:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/samsung-ssd-dc-toolkit
I don't think Kingston offers anything in that niche. I know very little about that, though.
" If it’s your boot drive, no luck there and you can try flashing while it’s mounted." Err no, that's when you boot from USB stick. Or do it from initramfs. Or anything, other than modifying the firmware of a drive you are running from.
Firmware Updates (0x16): 3 Slots, no Reset required
Reminds me when about ten years ago, working in an all-Linux company there was an issue with some Lenovo docking stations. I don't recall anymore what the issue was exactly, just that something wouldn't work properly when you plugged in a laptop with Linux. The problem was solved by a firmware upgrade, but upgrading the docking station firmware was possible only from Windows. So there was this one poor person in IT w…
That reminds me of an internal hard disk I had several years ago. I think it was a Seagate, but it might have been Western Digital. This was a retail drive bought at BestBuy, and the box specifically said that it worked with Windows, MacOS, and Linux, although it noted that their fancy add-on software only worked under Windows. No problem for me, because I didn't need the fancy add-on software. A year later the drive…
Passthrough to a VM, though I suppose the Windows license could be an issue.
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Windows PE/To Go has been a thing for a while now, it's a shame you can only make bootable Windows USB disks using the enterprise editions. Though Macrium Reflect (and possibly others) will let you make a USB "recovery disk" that might run the firmware update programs you'd like to run. edit: Windows PE won't do .msi, but .exe should work: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
> it's a shame you can only make bootable Windows USB disks using the enterprise editions I remember in the Windows XP era, there was a third-party piece of software called BartPE. With BartPE you could create a preinstalled environment with WinXP Home even. Here is a page someone wrote with some details about BartPE: http://www.optimizingpc.com/miscellaneous/manual_bartpe.html Wikipedia: > As with Windows Preinstall…
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It also raises concerns about trust. What if I don't trust proprietary Windows and don't want to run it? It can potentially compromise my SSD during the update.
Bad news, the ssd firmware is also proprietary
This is some insanity that shouldn't be needed, when fwupd[0] exists. Samsung is to blame for this. [0]: https://fwupd.org/
I had run into the same problem with Kingston - no firmware on the web, update tool only for Windows. Had to ask local distributor to contact Kingston and ask for firmware. I was lucky to get it, but never bought another Kingston drive. I don't understand how datacenter SSD manufacturer can so blatantly ignore Linux.
I don't want to buy SanDisk SSDs anymore because of this, but I guess every SSD manufacturer is the same when it comes to firmware updates.