Update firmware of Samsung EVO 840 and 850 SSD drives on Linux
Firmware upgrade procedure
Samsung EVO 840
For the EVO 840 I downloaded the firmware for Mac, which was an ISO file. I mounted the ISO to a local directory, copied out the .img file I found, then wrote the .img file directly to a USB flash drive. My USB flash drive specified as /dev/sdx.
# mount Samsung_SSD_840_EVO_Series_EXT0BB6Q_Mac.iso /mnt
# dd if=/mnt/isolinux/btdsk.iso of=/dev/sdx
# sync
# umount /mnt
Download from https://www.samsung.com/no/support/model/MZ-7TE500LW/#downloads.
I rebooted the system and enabled Legacy USB boot in my UEFI (BIOS),
and followed the procedure. At one point, I was asked to power cycle the
disk before confirming I had done so. I pulled the power plug of the disk
and put it back in, before I confirmed with Y.
Samsung EVO 850
For the EVO 850, the firmware update ISO can be directly written to a USB flash drive.
# dd if=Samsung_SSD_850_EVO_EMT02B6Q_Mac.iso of=/dev/sdx
# sync
https://www.samsung.com/no/support/model/MZ-75E250B/EU/#downloads
Tools
To check the firmware version of my disks, I use smartctl from the
smartmontools package in Arch.
# smartctl /dev/sdb --info
smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [x86_64-linux-5.3.4-arch1-1-ARCH] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Samsung based SSDs
Device Model: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB
Serial Number: [redacted]
LU WWN Device Id: [redacted]
Firmware Version: EXT0BB6Q
User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate: Solid State Device
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: ACS-2, ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 4c
SATA Version is: SATA 3.1, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is: Wed Oct 9 23:28:48 2019 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
The above output was taken after the upgrade of the EVO 840.
References
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/333853/update-firmware-of-samsung-840-pro
- https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/smartmontools/
If you have any comments or feedback, please send me an e-mail. (stig at stigok dotcom).
Did you find any typos, incorrect information, or have something to add? Then please propose a change to this post.