[fareesh]

Is there any significant benefit of updating firmware? Intuitively it seems like the risk/reward is very skewed towards not doing it. I've never really updated the firmware on any component other than routers or motherboard/bios.

[tzs]

It really depends on what the update does.

Sometimes an update just fixes some incompatibility with some specific hardware. If you are not using that hardware then there probably isn't much benefit from updating. Well, at least if you are either sure that you won't need to use that incompatible hardware later, or are sure that if you ever do need that hardware you will still be able to update.

Sometimes though an update fixes a more pressing defect. For example I updated the firmware on my Samsung 840 EVO drives several years ago because of this issue that caused significant performance degradation [1].

Another example is a firmware update I recently applied to my AKiTio Thunder3 Quad Mini Thunderbolt storage enclosure. The issue there was that when MacOS put drives to sleep occasionally the enclosure would report that the drive ejected. Getting the drive back seemed to require ejecting the other drives in the enclosure and then power cycling it.

This was annoying, but easy to work around by setting the OS to not put drives to sleep. All my drives were SSD so keeping them awake didn't use too much extra power. I ran like this while waiting for them to release a firmware update. After a couple years of waiting I stopped checking.

After a couple years or so of not checking, I remembered and checked and sure enough there was an update specifically for this issue. It was a bit of a pain because they had discontinued the Thunder3 Quad Mini a while back, and some time after that had stopped updating their firmware updater for it. It only ran on MacOS up through 10.15.7, and I was on 12.something.

I ended up using a USB SATA dock and an old spinning disk that was lying around to install MacOS 10.15.something on that and boot from it so I could run AKiTio's updater. Worked like a charm. It would have been a lot more annoying if I hadn't happened to have had the USB dock and old drive sitting around.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-...

[topynate]

It looks like the author was mining a particular sort of cryptocurrency which needs a lot of drive space. I guess he was trying to squeeze as much performance out of his SSDs as possible.

For most applications I can't see why you'd really need to update your SSD firmware, unless the manufacturer messed up their wear-levelling or something like that in the release firmware.

[chiefsucker]

Just to give you an example: Some Samsung SSDs have slightly strange TRIM behavior that basically seems to get unnoticed during normal workloads.

But when you build a Hackintosh with a recent version of macOS this exact TRIM behavior results in boot times of several minutes (compared to a dozen of seconds or so on a SSD with a better TRIM implementation).

I’m not saying Samsung will ever fix their TRIM implementation, but in theory this would be fixable by a firmware update.

And don’t get me even started on the crap that TRIM is, why we shouldn’t need it in the first place, and how convoluted its development was.

[kronks]

I can’t imagine firmware updates providing tangible performance gains aside from critical issues (which may affect performance). I just don’t think it’s really in the interest of these manufacturers to invest in R&D to improve an already existing and purchased product, as lame as that is.

[alias_neo]

As a software engineer myself, I would say yes, but I'm biased. I know no code is released perfect.

Then for something high performance like an NVM.e SSD, you could potentially gain a lot of performance, or lose it, depending on the manufacturer's goals for stability vs speed.

After a couple of decades of updating firmware on things whenever possible (including my car which had me leave the engine running sitting in the car with the window down for 2 hours in the winter), I'm yet to have a real issue.

That said, I also have the tools and skills to dump flash chips and would suggest doing that to anyone before an update of certain devices, or, you know, just don't do it, as you suggest.

[vladvasiliu]

> After a couple of decades of updating firmware on things whenever possible, I'm yet to have a real issue.

I used to be in the same boat, up until a few weeks ago when I updated the BIOS on my new work laptop. It's been a shitshow ever since: it takes around one minute to POST, the webcam isn't detected anymore, it doesn't go to sleep.

And the best part? "Because this update contains security features, it cannot be rolled back".

---

edit to name and shame: HP EliteBook 845 G8

[alias_neo]

I have found that on my machines, they provide a means to disable the security check and allow the downgrade anyway.

This is a real issue though, there is the risk of failure during the procedure, less so than it once was, but then the risk that the update actually performs worse than the previous version.

The latter I don't know how we resolve.

[vladvasiliu]

> I have found that on my machines, they provide a means to disable the security check and allow the downgrade anyway.

I was usually able to this, and my other HP machines propose to do a BIOS downgrade. But in this particular case I haven't managed to do a rollback, even with a "BIOS recovery", whatever that is.

[alias_neo]

That's unfortunate. Does your company buy a lot of these?

Perhaps they can get in touch with your supplier to pass a complaint about the poor update so they might be able to pass it on to their devs and hopefully fix the issue?

[vladvasiliu]

We only buy HP PCs, but we don't have a relationship with them (we go through a middleman). And also, this particular model is not common for us, I chose it for the Zen 3 CPU and upgradability. The usual PCs are the basic Intel i5 du jour, so I can't compare notes with other people. I'm also pretty much the only one doing firmware upgrades with any regularity.

[throwra620]

Enable quick boot

[vladvasiliu]

Haven't seen any "quick" boot. There's a "fast" one, though, but toggling it doesn't do anything in this case.

[londons_explore]

Firmware updates often push new "business opportunities" for the manufacturer... Eg. HP printers that suddenly start forcing you to buy new cartridges after an automatic firmware update, since they realise that by forcing you to buy new cartridges before they're really empty, you'll buy more.

[alias_neo]

While this can be an issue, it's an obvious one and I'd say a good reason to avoid manufacturers and devices that enable such anti-user behaviour.

Generally speaking though, outside of printer ink, which I've always considered to be a racket, this sort of thing is perhaps less of an issue.

That's not to say people like Sonos and others haven't used firmware updates to brick otherwise perfectly functional devices in order to force consumers to "upgrade" before now.

[b112]

Hard drive, and SSD firmwares have had massive issues in the past, including ones causing major filesystem corruption and data loss.

There was even once a bug which, after X hours of SMART recorded usage, would cause the SSD to lockup every hour thereafter: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/oh18a/attention_c...

SSD firmware issues can be very serious.

[dncornholio]

SSD firmware issues? I think you mean SSD issues that are solved by new firmware?

[b112]

Not precisely sure what you are saying. If you mean "flaws in the ssd hardware fixed by a firmware update", that probably exists too.

But I meant "faulty firmwares due to bad firmware code, needing updates".

[stjohnswarts]

I generally don't update firmware ever unless there is a problem. One exception is bios. Then if I have the occassional mysterious freeze/reboot I'll try it. Also if there is something like known ram size or particular hardware fix. But I can count those on 1 hand over 20 years. Also I suppose there are cases when you bought stuff just as it came out, there can be useful firmware updates after the first several months it is on the market.

[2ion]

Haven't seen any useful changelogs from major vendors short of the event of fixing a known very bad bug.

In any case, I treat this as a high risk operation; no HDD/SSD firmware flashing without making sure the backup is working...

[naoqj]

Firmware bugs can shorten the lifespan or lower the speed of a drive. On the other hand, bugs can be introduced in new versions, and reverting to an old version is not always easy to do.

[dncornholio]

This is a very good take. I've seen products being bashed on because they don't push out regular updates. In my opinion, the less updates the software needs, the better it is.

[chiefsucker]

The less updates a software gets, the higher is the probability that you’re dealing with abandonware.