I can remember the Altair 8800 in, I think, Byte magazine - when it was on paper and you had to buy it at the newspaper store. What really made me to post here was the pragmatism from WD that they don't update their drives, and you comment: So I (again) assume other manufacturers probably were actively correcting mishaps on software, bugs and such that could affect their firmware's. Also several firmware releases show the same fix so I guess they did not get it right initially or something else was fixed. It doesn't specifically defines what an 'unexpected SMART trip' is though, there I found several releases (at least 4) of firmware's for the same drives.

I went further and 'assumed' a firmware update will correct the issue if there was any, and I found something related for my Seagate drives. 'If ID’s 5, 197, or 198 have any value greater than zero (0) then there has been some defect identified in the media.'Īny other counters in the case of Seagate's specifically could have different than zero values but not been really 'an error' like for example ID 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate, which every other manufacturer should be zero but for Seagate is common to accumulate. Seagate does it and you don't have to contact support to download the latest firmware including the changes and why it is recommended to update.Ĭlick to expand.That is correct, thank you for the guide, it is very helpful, I read it before, and extracted these (your exact words): Now if it is WD policy not to provide the firmware directly to customers I could understand that but I will consider my drive choices (and others too) more carefully in the future. If you tell me the Greens which is a consumer drive fine but the HGST's which are not consumer drives at least not marketed like that and sometimes used on OEM equipment like Dell, HP or what have you I know for a fact that these drives are usually reviewed and new firmware provided for them, many times through the OEM.

Anyway modern drives are released by all manufacturers and on the field they found problems with the drives sometimes overshooting on seeks or with specific bugs on the firmware release. Hi omitted, thank you for your answer, it really doesn't provide a satisfactory response, I have been in the technology business for many years, when the drives were 5 mbytes in size and manufactured by Winchester, WD was top of the line and I used those continuously.

Seagate firmware updater