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Hard Drive firmware

Jsalpha2

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 19, 2011
Messages
209
I have some old WD spinner hard drives that I am planning to use for backup. Not broken, but if I update the firmware using the WD Universal Firmware Updater 4.0.1.4 will it do anything useful? If I do it, I need to do it before moving any data to it. Thanks
 
Sometimes there is a large-scale firmware release, such as the Seagate 7200.11 where ALL drives of a particular firmware MUST be upgraded or they will fail. For most spinning rust, firmware updaes are released to mitigate certain, specific issues which may or may not affect you. Some firmware updates, most often for enterprise drives which mitigate one issue can actually make performance “different” such as increase write speed at the expense of read speed. If you want to upgrade it you can, but you may not see any difference in your use case. SSD firmware on the other hand is publicly released much more often and generally SHOULD be updated with certain caveats, such as when doing so will zero your drive! RTFM on the updater and the firmware README and have a backup or two in place before you begin. Firmware updates will sometimes create issues for drives in RAID arrays depending on your controller and how the drive is updated.
 
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I remember the Seagate 7200.11 and also the Samsung F4 one where on the Samsung if you checked the smart status while writing data the drive would discard what you wrote leaving the sector unchanged and not report any kind of error in smart or the write. I have a thread here about this and I still own 3 or so of the affected drives (patched to fix the bug).


Here is the Samsung F4 thread: https://hardforum.com/threads/new-drive-badblocks.1551753/
 
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I remember the Seagate 7200.11 and also the Samsung F4 one where on the Samsung if you checked the smart status while writing data the drive would discard what you wrote leaving the sector unchanged and not report any kind of error in smart or the write.
I remember that Samsung bug/fiasco very well. A drive firmware bug resulting in data loss is a pretty big deal. When Samsung fixed the bug, they made a big show of it--special web page, pictures of affected drive labels, and, of course, the usual file downloads and instructions. But, here's the kicker (and I'll bet drescherjm will recall :)): The new firmware had the same FW version as the buggy one--those fools didn't update the version#.
... I still own 3 or so of the affected drives (patched to fix the bug).
Did you put a big label on each drive indicating it was now safe?
 
here's the kicker (and I'll bet drescherjm will recall :)): The new firmware had the same FW version as the buggy one--those fools didn't update the version#.

I do remember it now. That was very annoying that they did not change the version so you had to test if the drive corrupted itself to be sure..

Did you put a big label on each drive indicating it was now safe?

No, I did not.
 
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