Information on firmware for different SSDs we have. Remember that SSDs are magic and their firmware changes how things are stored across versions. In some cases to take advantage of new features, the disk needs to be SATA secure erased so the firmware can start over. But doing so erases the disk of course, but if you are in a RAID situation, hopefully you can shift things around in order to be able to do this.
Samsung¶
last updated Aug 31, 2015
The 840EVO had several bugs that cause performance to degrade over time (Oct 2014) and old data needing to be refreshed (Apr 2015).
The 850EVO firmware doesn’t have the problem, and the latest version on the website is the version all drives have shipped with.
| Model | Version | Tool Version |
|---|---|---|
| 840EVO | EXT0DB6Q | 4.7 |
| 850EVO | EMT02B6Q | N/A |
- Reddit thread on updating with Linux
- The bootable DOS ISO is the least painful method, but requires vga access.
Intel¶
X25-V 40gb
As of 2011-03-21 the latest firmware update tool is v1.7. Intel provides an ISO image for updating the firmware. This ISO only works with certain controllers (only Intel controllers?) so you may have to find a system with the right type of controller in order to do the update (turkey, monal, moa). You might also have to put the controller into non-AHCI mode temporarily for it to see all the drives.
This drive was added to the smartmontools database in SVN r3155 (diff) according to this email. That version isn’t (as of 2010-12-20) in Debian, once it is I will backport to squeeze and lenny-sloppy.
Currently if you run smartmontools on this drive it reports the current firmware revision. If you look on the above Intel URL for this drive it will say the version of the firmware that it updates it to. You can compare these two in order to determine if the drive needs an update without needing to boot the update utility.
| FW version | Tool version |
|---|---|
| 2CV102HD | 1.5 |
| 2CV102M3 | 1.7 |
| 2CV102M3 | 1.92 |
To update the firmware, you can either PXE boot or use a USB drive to boot a real CD. To do a PXE boot you need to have pxebooting setup already, and then you need to have recent (4.06) copy of /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 and /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk from the syslinux-common package, and the ISO in your tftproot directory (owned by the tftp daemon). Then you need pxelinux.cfg/default to have this:
LABEL SSD_firmware_02M3
LINUX /memdisk
APPEND iso raw
INITRD /011102M388208850.ISO
Then it should work… but doesn’t on some systems.
Intel 320 40gb/80gb/120gb
Uses the same firmware update tool as the above
| FW version | Tool version |
|---|---|
| 4PC10302 | 1.7 |
| 4PC10362 | 1.93 |
| 4PC10362 | 2.1.0 |
Intel 520 60gb
| FW version | Tool version |
|---|---|
| 400i | 1.93 |
OCZ Vertex2 40gb¶
Currently (2010-12-20) the latest firmware version is 1.33.
OCZ provides a tool for updating the firmware that works great.
smartmontools support for this drive wasn’t added until upstream SVN r3135 (diff), which isn’t in Debian yet.
