Manufacturers don't seem to release firmware updates for hard drives very often, but even when they do, consumers may never learn that they need to apply an upd

Manufacturers don't seem to release firmware updates for hard drives very often, but even when they do, consumers may never learn that they need to apply an update to a drive they own so the actual update rate in the wild is probably very low. As an example of a rather serious firmware update that likely went unnoticed by most drive owners, some Samsung F4 EcoGreen hard drives (the ones Samsung actually made before the Seagate buyout) had a serious bug[1] that caused data corruption if a specific S.M.A.R.T. command was issued to the drive during normal operation: "The above suggests that the disk sometimes discards a pending 64 sector write command when a IDENTIFY DEVICE command is received. This data loss occurs silently. There is no error message in kernel log, SMART Error log, NCQ Command Error log page, or SATA Phy Event Counters log page." Manufacturers can't notify people directly about these things unless buyers contact info is submitted along with info about which specific drive model they own. I don't know if this patch was pushed out via Windows Update but I'd bet it wasn't. I only heard about it because Smartmontools warned me. Samsung fixed it in a firmware update but neglected to bump the version number of the firmware, so it's impossible to tell which drives have been fixed. As a result, it's quite easy to assume your drive is fine, so Smartmontools will print this in any system with any HD204UI or HD155UI detected: ==> WARNING: Using smartmontools or hdparm with this drive may result in data loss due to a firmware bug. ****** THIS DRIVE MAY OR MAY NOT BE AFFECTED! ****** Buggy and fixed firmware report same version number! See the following web pages for details: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223571en http://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks [1] http://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks http://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks