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Comment by ps | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

I got a (consumer) SSD from SanDisk that says on the package "Compatible with Windows and Linux systems that take M.2 2280 PCIe 3 x 4 NVMe SSD's" yet I can't update the firmware from Linux. I would have to download the SanDisk SSD Dashboard which is only available for Windows.

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.

Would it work to update the firmware under Windows and then switch back to Linux?

Of course.

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.

That's true. A good example of the difference between "scale" and consumer solutions. I can switch to Windows for that stuff and back to Linux afterwards. Doing so for a fleet of office machines is already out of the question.

Now I really have to check if I get firmware updates from Lenovo for all the hardware in my Thinkpad... I always assumed I do!

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

At least it doesn't contain adware (yet?). I can choose to trust Samsung (I already did when I bought their SSD) and not trust Microsoft.

SSD firmware adding ads to the files you save would be peak ad industry.

I've got a better nightmare - processors injecting ads in realtime :D

Damn, you beat me there! Question is, how do we leverage the GPU and RAM for a fully inclusive, and delightfully brilliant, customer experience?

Yes but a thumb drive win10 is a pia to make and then an extra pia to try to boot on any machine other than the one it was created on.

Or, you could buy from hardware vendors that do the reasonable thing.

Those who know of such HDD/SSD vendors (esp. those supporting lvfs) please chime in.

Crucial offers bootable ISOs to upgrade. My goto SSD brand for years now. Usually second to Samsung in performance but cheaper.

Half the time you can't take the machine down to run those updates on the disks, anyway.

One day a long time ago Dell actually sent us the cheapest server they made, R200 or R300 to flash disks in because we had so many to do.

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