Upgrading Kingston SSD firmware in Ubuntu?

Question

I'm having problems with my second Kingston SSD in the past few years.

The folks here have raised the possibility that I might need to update the firmware.

I'm about to buy a new SSD and reinstall the whole system, so it's worth a shot.

I see that Kingston does maintain an SSD Manager but that it's only available for Windows. I had no luck using Wine and can't currently get a Windows 10 ISO to load onto VMWare.

Does anybody know of any other way to upgrade the firmware?

SSD Manager - kingston.com

Solution

Kingston's utility to update SSD firware on Sandforce based drives, created by James Huey https://gitlab.com/vinibali/kingston_fw_updater

And short manual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg7NTqmWxAk

Comments

[crip659]

If you have enough space on the ssd, why not just download a windows copy from microsoft and put it on a small partition to use for updates like this and for any bios updates. I think there are ways to do it from ubuntu, but think they might take longer than installing windows, and make it easy, instead of finding work arounds that might not work. Can always delete windows after. I like KISS.

[crip659]

Could try using virtualbox, but not sure how well a virtual instance would install firmware.

[Daniel Rosehill]

@crip659 I took your advice and installed Windows on a bare-metal partition. What do you know - apparently all the SSDs, even the ones with bad blocks, are apparently all okay and with updated firmware! Handy to have the utility but not sure it always accurately captures disk state.

[crip659]

Ubuntu is fantastic, but sometimes a bit of software will work only in windows well. There are also a few disk check/health programs that you can download and use in windows, if you want.

[jarno]

Another option is to connect the SSD to a PC that has Windows and update the firmware there.

[jarno]

Some hardware vendors provide firmware updates via Linux Vendor Firmware Service.