HDD firmware updates, best practice

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Tim

Member
Nov 7, 2012
105
6
18
Setup is vmware ESXi 5.1 with LSI HBA in passthrough and the disks is used in Solaris with ZFS.

I finaly got smartmontools running from Solaris.
Looked at how napp-it did it (install and config of smartmontools and the runtime parameters).
Don't know why previous attempts has faild me, but that's not important now. So tanks to napp-it.

I also installed napp-it to have a look and under disks - smartinfo, in the error column I've got the soft-errors (16, 17 and 19 on three disks).
I've not been running smartmontools 16-19 times on the disks.
This is commented as a known increment while running smartmontools, so, is this a bad thing or nothing to worry about?

The other thing, and as the topic is about - the smartmontools revealed that the firmware on my disks is old.
It's four Seagate barracuda disks, the two 3TB disks has firmware CC46 (the oldest firmware, there's four newer ones out there).
The two 2TB disks has the CC4C firmware.

Seagate provides a windows tool, and claim that no data will be lost if done right.
And a bootable tool as well.

Any experiences with these firmware updates, when FS is ZFS, and any data loss?
There's no changelog so I don't know what's fixed or not. (I do have a bad noise from one of the disks so a firmware update might be a good thing).
I guess I'll have to shut down the system and use the non-windows tools to flash new firmware to the disks.
Can I upgrade them all in one go or do I have to take them one at a time and reboot?
 

Thatguy

New Member
Dec 30, 2012
45
0
0
If it aint broke don't fix it.

All the ZFS metadata is stored on disk. Nothing ZFS related would be stored in anything a firmware update should touch.

Only issue I can forsee is if they change the sector addressing, but that's unlikely, and would nuke data for other filesystems too.

Depending on what raid level you're running, you could just do one disk at a time, have ZFS scrub, make sure there's no issues, then move onto flashing the next disk, scrub, etc.

I'm not sure about your soft errors. I'd do some googling on that subject.
 

Tim

Member
Nov 7, 2012
105
6
18
No raid levels.
I'll backup my (important) data just in case of any errors.
I'll do the ZFS scrub thing too.