Hi,
As I purchased a few MG09ACA18TE, I also wanted to check firmware status, found this helpful thread and thought I might have a closer look.
Apparently, there exist some "parallel firmware streams", which appear to relate to different OEM versions.
From the Toshiba communication cited earlier, it could be assumed that the "01xx" series is (or "meant to be") the baseline version for general availability. These versions (0103, 0105, 0107) can be found in some controller/HDD compatibility lists showing this drive, e.g. by Promise.
Of this 01-series, the highest version spotted appears to be "0107" (see e.g. DocMAX's version above before flashing), the highest available as image for flashing seems to be 0105.
In addition, 33xx, 40xx, 43xx (highest file available: 4306) versions appear to exist. To add to the confusion, some drives sold by what appears to be directly Toshiba have been spotted with 43xx firmware.
Further, Lenovo branded versions of the drive appear to use firmwares starting with "TJ", e.g. TJA3 (which looks to be the latest of that stream).
I haven't seen any confirmation whether cross-flashing between Lenovo versions and "other versions" is possible.
Has anyone tried this?
It also has to be noted that there appear to be different revisions of the drive. I do not know the differences, but as different revisions can have the same firmware, those revisions appear to point to other differences than different firmware alone.
Doing a quick check of Google-indexed photos of MG09ACA18TE labels yields the following data points for revisions and factory firmware versions:
Rev. A0 (2021, 2022, 2023): 0102, 4301
Rev. A1 (2021, 2023, 2024): 4302, 4306
Rev. A1 (2022): 4004
Rev. A2 (2021, 2022, 2024): 0104
Rev. A3 (2022): 0105
Rev. A4 (2022, 2023, 2024): 0105
Rev. A5 (2024, 2025): 0107
MG09ACA16TE also:
Rev. A2 (2024): 4306
The 0105 firmware seems to appear in 2022.
The 4306 firmware seems to appear in 2023.
Note that I did not spot any labels showing the above-mentioned Lenovo firmware codes.
Has anyone seen or purchased such a "Lenovo-branded MG09ACA18TE"?
Looking into the headers of the firmware files reveals some of their secrets:
0105: OEM, 2022.04.15
3301: China DC3, 2021.10.27
4306: China DC2, 2023.01.31
TJA3: Lenovo-X, 2022.05.20
The "consumer version" N300 Pro (e.g. HDWG51J) apparently also uses the 01xx firmware numbering scheme. Based on the release notes, it looks like those might use separate "even number" and "odd number" branches. For these drive models, the latest updates 0104 -> 0108 and 0105 -> 0109 contain wake-up-from-sleep improvements and are classified as "optional updates" (not "recommended" or "important").
Based on the earlier posts, the following updates worked fine:
0104 -> 4306
0107 -> 4306
Yet, note that this results in having a China data center version instead of the OEM version.
Finding out the differences might be a challenging task. Export restrictions for encryption would be a theoretical thought, but the "ACA" version of this drive does not have such functionality.
So, to stay on the OEM path, the latest available update would be 0105.
I have not yet checked whether this could be used to update both "even" and "odd" versions.
