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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

It depends on what is in the changelog. If there are performance or durability improvements, you might want to change the firmware even if you are not facing a significant issue. The downside is the risk to data on the disk - don't do that (or anything, really) on a drive that holds the only copy of something important.

If the drive is being moved to a different array or machine and the data is to be lost anyway, the risk is very low and, if the process is easy (unlike this) it might be a sensible move.

I agree "just because it's new" is a poor justification to risk data.

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More often than not, the changelog just states "performance improvement" or "bug fix", without any detail on what they've done.

For example, I've been bitten before by Dell due to plundervolt updates that removed the undervolting capability under the umbrella of "security fixes".

> I've been bitten before by Dell due to plundervolt updates that removed the undervolting capability

That's enterprise computing for you.

Been bitten by that kind of shenanigan more often than I can remember.

Happened to a colleague. Not sure if he ever found out how to rollback to the older version.

Usually BIOSes can be flashed with the machine off, using a "chip-clip" programmer.

They can but the data on the chip is a combination of machine specific identifiers, config data, and BIOS code. If you chip flash it you have to get an image from some sketchy place and it will nuke your serial number etc. You can also have problems if your RAM is made by a different manufacturer. Chip flashing is a last resort.

Usually there isn't, unless there is a sufficiently serious issue with the update.

Why wouldn't there be a rollback option, especially on enterprise hardware? If it breaks something you need to revert, and quickly

HP has a bootable Linux CD that updates all the firmware on their devices, since the early 00's. We used to regularly update firmware across our entire fleet of servers during maintenance cycles. Never had a failure.

You are speaking about enterprise grade hardware which is meant to be updated. Consumer stuff not as much.

Back in the day I'd just wing it, hey, firmware update the only harddrive I own, what could go wrong.

Now if it's not on at least two drives within a few hours of something new (photo, video, work done, whatever) it seems like a terrible risk.

Part getting old, part being able to afford to have redundancy, I guess. Storage feels so much cheaper now.

And in part because you remember all the times YOLO went wrong and you bricked stuff / lost data

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