No matter how long it's connected without being used it never spins down and sleeps. Unzip and open an elevated shell.I have a portable Seagate hdd Backup Plus Slim. Download the firmware and seachest utility provided in a zip file. The easiest way to get the correct firmware build and seachest firmware flash tool: Įnter the serial number of your drive. If you have a ton of drives you can use a cfg file to flash and convert many drives. The documentation in SeaChest_Lite states you can flash your drives with that utility but I have ~30 drives that were RMA'ed as a result of failed flashes.īelow are the details to correctly flash your seagate drives. We noticed in mix drive environments (specifically the Evans and MobulaBP Seagate series) the seachest lite did not always flash correctly.Īfter some back and forth with seagate engineers there are specific builds of their seachest firmware tool. Then we switch 512e to 4k, unless, of course they are 4Kn

Whenever we refresh our drives we always flash each batch with the same firmware revision. I manage PB scale storage arrays for a research center. I stumbled across this thread after running into some of the same issues mentioned and thought I would add how to flash your drives to the same rev. In an elevated (admin) Command Prompt window, scan for your drive with the command: Here's the solution for Windows (you can do it in Linux also, with similar command line options) PS- Yes, I know that using ashift=12 works fine with 512e drives, that's not my question, I want to convert the drives to 4Kn using the Fast Format feature. What tool or command line option can I use to do this? Do you have to use the Seagate Seatools (it doesn't even appear to support it)? Does BSD or Windows support this? Or sg_format? Or parted? I've search all over the web and cannot find any information on this. This is documented in the Seagate documentation, but they neglect to say how you do it, and with what tool.

They come formatted in 512e by default, but they support 'Fast Format' to convert to 4Kn so that they appear as a true 4Kn to the OS. I'm planning to purchase some Seagate Exos X16 (model ST16000NM001G) 16TB drives.

Seagate drive utility