I have purchased and I am using multiple WD Blue 3.5" HDDs.
I’ve had some filesystem failures, mainly with Btrfs and Bcache, and I’ve learned that there’s some firmware issues that might have caused that due to misbehaving HDD’s internal write cache. Here’s source.
Because of that I want to update the firmware on these drives to eliminate the issues and potential data loss that can result from them. I do not have access to Windows or OS X machines. All my computers run GNU/Linux-based systems.
I have been searching online for solutions but I found nothing except for running WD software on Windows.
I have installed fwupd and gnome-firmware on my main Arch Linux machine.
These tools give me conflicting information.
One says my WD drives are updatable, the other says there are no updates available:
❯ fwupdmgr get-updates
Devices with no available firmware updates:
• TS256GMTS400
• WDC WD20EZRZ-00Z5HB0
• WDC WD40EZRZ-00GXCB0
• WDC WD40EZRZ-22GXCB0
No updatable devices
As I understand this - there is newer firmware available, but it wasn’t made available by Western Digital through Linux Vendor Firmware Service.
I would like to know how can I make sure Western Digital products I’ve purchased are up to date and free of firmware bugs without being forced to use Microsoft Windows.
If that’s not possible, I’ll probably have to return a few new units I’ve purchased in the recent days and move to other vendors that do support Linux.
I would certainly hope it’s not the case though.
Am I missing something?
