Hard disk Firmware update on the Linux command line
Sometimes you will find that your hard disk is slow, or there are some other issues with disk performance. If you are lucky, the disk is not broken. It could have some firmware bugs, and if you are even more lucky, the manufacturer could have issued a firmware update. I've updated several hard disk firmwares in the past. Usually you have to use a boot disk with DOS or something to update the firmware. Why updating firmware? One of my hard disks in the past needed a new firmware because it was dropping out from a RAID controller. It began working fine after the firmware update. The latest hard disk that needed firmware update was Seagate 15k.7 ST3450857SS SAS. I noticed that the disks sometimes slowed down during writes and even stalled. I use two 450GB disks in software RAID 1. By googling I found that there were other people having similar problems with the same disk and that there were actually a firmware update available from Seagate. Also Dell, HP and IBM seems to ha...