From Newsgroup: comp.lang.mumps

<div>I'm having problems with my SSD (samsung 850 PRO) on linux so I wanted to update the firmware. I reinstalled windows and downloaded the magician software. It recognizes my SSD, I can run some benchmarks, but there's a message saying "this drive is not supported".</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>samsung firmware</div><div></div><div>Download: https://t.co/QFnzH9nVxW </div><div></div><div></div><div>I've then gone into the samsung's website to download the firmware updater. It gives me an ISO file that I should burn using uNetBooting onto a pen drive (it says that this is a firmware update through windows, but it actually is a linux image that will run in the pen drive and do the update, I guess).</div><div></div><div></div><div>Go to Go to the "Samsung SSD Firmware" section. The links there to go to standalone ISO images which you can either burn to a CD/DVD, or convert into a bootable USB drive (by following the Samsung firmware install guide or using unetbootin). Make sure to choose the link that matches your drive!</div><div></div><div></div><div>I ran into the exact same issues. Setting my BIOS "Boot mode" option to "Legacy" allowed my machine to boot the Samsung SSD firmware updater successfully. I changed the setting back after updating the firmware without any issues.</div><div></div><div></div><div>I followed the instructions and after I installed the new SSD, I tried to install the Samsung Magician but I found out that it doesn't work on a Mac. I contacted Samsung to ask how I would update the firmware for the SSD and they said:</div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div>That is the case for the majority of SSD manufacturers as they only provide a Windows only method of updating an SSD's firmware. Some SSD manufacturers do provide an OS independent SSD firmware updater in the form of an .iso image which can be burned to a CD or a USB stick. Crucial and OWC provide OS independent SSD firmware updaters and Samsung tends to do so as well although it can be very difficult finding the Samsung .iso firmware updater downloads.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Search the Samsung website for an OS independent .iso SSD firmware updater for your exact model SSD. Just going to the Samsung support webpage may not be enough. IIRC, the Samsung SSD .iso firmware updaters are accessed from an independent page outside of the traditional support page for your specific model SSD. You may need to Google it and find a link to the Samsung website. Do not trust any downloads from third party sites.</div><div></div><div></div><div>In theory you should be able to use the downloaded .iso image file as a source for Etcher (Mac/Windows/Linux) to create a bootable SSD firmware updater USB stick. I checked the contents of the .iso file and the Mac appears to have the necessary boot file for a Mac. You will need to Option Boot the Samsung USB stick and select the orange icon most likely labeled "EFI". If a USB stick does not work, then burning the .iso to a CD may be required.</div><div></div><div></div><div>I realize that you probably do not have answers for these questions, but why does Samsung make it so challenging to update the SSD firmware with a Mac? And when I asked Samsung Support, why would they not help me out by giving me the link like you did?</div><div></div><div></div><div>I never realized that updates to the SSD firmware would be so challenging, since all my research that I did before purchasing the Samsung SSD didn't indicate that the Samsung Magician couldn't be used with Macs......and none of the reviews for using the Samsung860 PRO SATA 2.5" SSD 1TB on a Mac indicated anything about the need and method to update firmware.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Unfortunately it is a Windows world and manufacturers don't think about anything else. I don't know why Samsung doesn't include the OS independent SSD firmware updaters on the main download support page for the specific SSD, but at least Samsung does provide the OS independent updaters unlike the majority of other manufacturers.</div><div></div><div></div><div>If you want SSD suggestions, then Crucial, Samsung, and OWC are good options because they all provide OS independent SSD firmware updaters with Crucial actually making it very easy to find their firmware updaters At this time for a 2.5" SATA SSD from Crucial you would want the MX500 series as it is a good compromise on price and performance and I have used them on a lot of 2012 Macs (and even some older ones going back to 2010). Just stay away from the Crucial BX500 series as it is a low end budget economy model which is as slow as a hard drive and tends to overheat quite easily. I'm not particularly fond of the OWC SSDs for several reasons especially the current models. Crucial and sometimes Samsung do at least provide information on what the firmware updates address unlike OWC which does not.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Unfortunately this is not working. It only works with a PS/2 keyboard which I do not have. So I was following these instructions here to boot with my normal EndeavourOS USB stick and start the firmware upgrade from there:</div><div></div><div></div><div>There are a lot of reasons to manually download firmware for your device. Maybe you're trying to root it and need to modify the stock firmware before flashing it. Or maybe you just want to download software updates early. Unfortunately, companies don't often make it easy to actually download that firmware in an easily-installable way.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Samsung especially likes to make it hard to manually download software updates. For one, there's no Fastboot mode on Samsung devices. To flash firmware, you have to go into Download Mode and use Samsung's proprietary flashing tool, Odin. Then, you have to actually get the firmware file to flash. If you try to download the firmware directly from Samsung, it'll be encrypted.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Luckily, that encryption isn't very strong, and the process of downloading and decrypting firmware directly from Samsung has been recreated many times. One notable example of this is the SamFirm program for Windows. SamFirm no longer works, but there are alternatives, like Frija, which are still functional.</div><div></div><div></div><div>The only problem with most of these downloader programs is that they're all for Windows. What if you want to download software updates for your Galaxy device from your Mac or Linux PC? Well, you could use one of the many firmware downloader websites out there. Those sites serve decrypted Samsung firmware for basically any Samsung device. You can browse for firmware by device model, filter by region, and even view the history of firmware versions.</div><div></div><div></div><div>But storing all those files gets expensive. To be maintainable, most downloader sites will restrict the download speed unless you pay for an account. Since Samsung's firmware packages are pretty big (recent devices are as large as 7GiB), downloading on a throttled connection can be pretty annoying. You could always pay for unlimited speeds, but not everyone's willing to do that.</div><div></div><div></div><div>So back to square one. How can you download firmware directly from Samsung if you don't have a Windows PC? Enter Samloader, a command-line program that runs on anything where Python 3 is installed. You can use Samloader to check for the latest update for your device, download that firmware, and even decrypt already-downloaded firmware, as long as you know the correct model, region, and firmware string.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Samloader is pretty great since it's a properly cross-platform solution to downloading Samsung firmware. But not everyone likes to use the command line. It can get confusing trying to install Python on macOS, for instance, and keeping track of all the needed command-line arguments can be tricky.</div><div></div><div></div><div>So I made a GUI. The very originally-named Samsung Firmware Downloader is a cross-platform graphical firmware downloader for Samsung. In spirit, it's a graphical wrapper around Samloader, but all of the logic has been rewritten in Kotlin. There are also some additional features.</div><div></div><div></div><div>Put your model and region into the corresponding fields in the Downloader view and hit "Check for Updates." The app will query Samsung's server and return the latest firmware version available, along with which version of Android it is.</div><div></div><div></div><div>If you just checked for updates in the Downloader view, you can then hit the Download button to start downloading that firmware. Choose a destination, and the app will download and decrypt the firmware automatically.</div><div></div><div></div><div>If you have an encrypted firmware file, you can use Samsung Firmware Downloader to decrypt it. Enter the model, region, and firmware version corresponding to the encrypted file, then select the file to decrypt, hit the "Decrypt" button, and the app will take care of the rest.</div><div></div><div></div><div>If you want to download a specific firmware from the list, hit the "Download" button. You'll be redirected to the Download view with the information already filled in. Then you can just hit "Download."</div><div></div><div></div><div>If you have a file to decrypt, you can find the corresponding firmware in this list and hit the "Decrypt" button. You'll be redirected to the Decrypt view, where you'll just need to choose the right file and hit "Decrypt."</div><div></div><div> df19127ead</div>
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