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Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

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Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#41

Post by m-p-3 »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #37

I already tried that method a while ago. For some reason fumagician refuses to recognize my 970 Evo Plus. > No supported SSD detected for Firmware Update It also doesn't work if you flash the ISO and boot "properly" as Samsung expects you to do.

It could be that your ISO doesn't have the required drivers for the storage controller to see the actual SSD.

It's a pain that sysadmins knows all too well when deploying a corporate Windows image through SCCM/MECM, and why they need to often update the embedded drivers in the Preinstallation Environment.

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#42

Post by trulyrandom »

dvratil wrote: post #24

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…

Hah, I know that pain. I'm optimistic about the future though. I recently installed Ubuntu on my new work laptop and soon after it offered to update the firmware of my Dell docking station. I was pleasantly surprised to see that.

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#43

Post by alias_neo »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #21
alias_neo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software engineer myself, I would say yes, but I'm biased. I know no code is released perfect. Then for something high performance like an NVM.e SSD, you could potentially gain a lot of performance, or lose it, depending on the manufacturer's goals for stability vs speed. After a couple of decades of updating firmware on things whenever possible (including my car which had me leave the engine running sitting in…

> After a couple of decades of updating firmware on things whenever possible, I'm yet to have a real issue. I used to be in the same boat, up until a few weeks ago when I updated the BIOS on my new work laptop. It's been a shitshow ever since: it takes around one minute to POST, the webcam isn't detected anymore, it doesn't go to sleep. And the best part? "Because this update contains security features, it cannot be…

I have found that on my machines, they provide a means to disable the security check and allow the downgrade anyway.

This is a real issue though, there is the risk of failure during the procedure, less so than it once was, but then the risk that the update actually performs worse than the previous version.

The latter I don't know how we resolve.

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#44

Post by dvratil »

trulyrandom wrote: post #42
dvratil wrote: post #24

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…

Hah, I know that pain. I'm optimistic about the future though. I recently installed Ubuntu on my new work laptop and soon after it offered to update the firmware of my Dell docking station. I was pleasantly surprised to see that.

Indeed things have improved massively in the past years. I think LVFS played a big role in that.

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#45

Post by [deleted] »

topynate wrote: post #18
fareesh wrote: post #15

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.

It looks like the author was mining a particular sort of cryptocurrency which needs a lot of drive space. I guess he was trying to squeeze as much performance out of his SSDs as possible. For most applications I can't see why you'd really need to update your SSD firmware, unless the manufacturer messed up their wear-levelling or something like that in the release firmware.

[deleted]

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#46

Post by codetrotter »

ece wrote: post #38
dvratil wrote: post #24

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…

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 Preinstallation Environment, BartPE operates by loading system registry files into RAM, and not writing any registry changes back to boot media. Thus, neither operating system requires an operational hard drive or network access. This also allows them to be run from non-writable media such as a CD-ROM.

> […]. The Bart PE Builder application interprets and condenses files from a Windows setup CD to create the BartPE installation. It can built from a Windows XP Pro or Home Edition CD, or from a preinstalled Windows XP version (without a CD).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BartPE

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#47

Post by tzs »

fareesh wrote: post #15

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.

It really depends on what the update does.

Sometimes an update just fixes some incompatibility with some specific hardware. If you are not using that hardware then there probably isn't much benefit from updating. Well, at least if you are either sure that you won't need to use that incompatible hardware later, or are sure that if you ever do need that hardware you will still be able to update.

Sometimes though an update fixes a more pressing defect. For example I updated the firmware on my Samsung 840 EVO drives several years ago because of this issue that caused significant performance degradation [1].

Another example is a firmware update I recently applied to my AKiTio Thunder3 Quad Mini Thunderbolt storage enclosure. The issue there was that when MacOS put drives to sleep occasionally the enclosure would report that the drive ejected. Getting the drive back seemed to require ejecting the other drives in the enclosure and then power cycling it.

This was annoying, but easy to work around by setting the OS to not put drives to sleep. All my drives were SSD so keeping them awake didn't use too much extra power. I ran like this while waiting for them to release a firmware update. After a couple years of waiting I stopped checking.

After a couple years or so of not checking, I remembered and checked and sure enough there was an update specifically for this issue. It was a bit of a pain because they had discontinued the Thunder3 Quad Mini a while back, and some time after that had stopped updating their firmware updater for it. It only ran on MacOS up through 10.15.7, and I was on 12.something.

I ended up using a USB SATA dock and an old spinning disk that was lying around to install MacOS 10.15.something on that and boot from it so I could run AKiTio's updater. Worked like a charm. It would have been a lot more annoying if I hadn't happened to have had the USB dock and old drive sitting around.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-...

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#48

Post by alias_neo »

londons_explore wrote: post #25
alias_neo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a software engineer myself, I would say yes, but I'm biased. I know no code is released perfect. Then for something high performance like an NVM.e SSD, you could potentially gain a lot of performance, or lose it, depending on the manufacturer's goals for stability vs speed. After a couple of decades of updating firmware on things whenever possible (including my car which had me leave the engine running sitting in…

Firmware updates often push new "business opportunities" for the manufacturer... Eg. HP printers that suddenly start forcing you to buy new cartridges after an automatic firmware update, since they realise that by forcing you to buy new cartridges before they're really empty, you'll buy more.

While this can be an issue, it's an obvious one and I'd say a good reason to avoid manufacturers and devices that enable such anti-user behaviour.

Generally speaking though, outside of printer ink, which I've always considered to be a racket, this sort of thing is perhaps less of an issue.

That's not to say people like Sonos and others haven't used firmware updates to brick otherwise perfectly functional devices in order to force consumers to "upgrade" before now.

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#49

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

m-p-3 wrote: post #41
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #37

I already tried that method a while ago. For some reason fumagician refuses to recognize my 970 Evo Plus. > No supported SSD detected for Firmware Update It also doesn't work if you flash the ISO and boot "properly" as Samsung expects you to do.

It could be that your ISO doesn't have the required drivers for the storage controller to see the actual SSD. It's a pain that sysadmins knows all too well when deploying a corporate Windows image through SCCM/MECM, and why they need to often update the embedded drivers in the Preinstallation Environment.

Sure, but it also doesn't work when running a proper Linux distribution from that same SSD, exactly like the author of the article described.

It's also an NVMe drive. I have a pretty vague idea of how PCI-Express drives work, but don't they go directly to the CPU without any storage controllers? It's more of a IDE/SATA/SAS/whatever thing.

Re: Update Firmware of Samsung SSDs in Linux

#50

Post by dncornholio »

fareesh wrote: post #15

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.

This is a very good take. I've seen products being bashed on because they don't push out regular updates. In my opinion, the less updates the software needs, the better it is.
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