In this blog post, I describe how to flash the Seagate Exos X16 to the latest firmware version. I recently purchased some of these Seagate Enterprise drives, and looks like they shipped with the SN02 Firmware. Upgrading on Windows is quite easy. Just be aware I tested with the drives still clean, while not in RAID.
If you were to run this on a live array, I strongly recommend doing one disk at a time, and taking the disk out of the array while you do it, to avoid any potential issues.
Steps:
1 – Download the newest firmware and Seachest tools from the seagate support page, by inputting your serial number.
2 – Extract the contents, and copy the following to C:\Seachest:
![seachest tool to flash the seagate exos](https://cdn.carlosfelic.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/image.png)
3 – Open a command prompt in administrator mode, and type SeaChest_Firmware_270_11923_64 --scan
to get a list of drives:
![seachest tool list drives](https://cdn.carlosfelic.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/image-1.png)
4 – Run the following command to flash the seagate exos, where “PX” is the Handle for the specific drive you want to update. In this example, I’m using PD0: SeaChest_Firmware_270_11923_64 -d PX --downloadFW EvansExosX16SATA-STD-512E-SN03.LOD
![flash the seagate exos with seachest](https://cdn.carlosfelic.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/image-4.png)
5 – Re-run the scan command, to confirm the firmware is indeed updated:
![seachest confirm firmware update worked](https://cdn.carlosfelic.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/image-3.png)
6 – And that’s it! Enjoy the latest firmware for your Exos drive!
NOTE: At the time this article was written, only SN03 was available, but recently Seagate has released a new update, SN04 for these drives. I plan on running some performance testing comparison between each firmware, and see if there is any significant difference. Unfortunately I could not find any release notes or changelog for them, but if you have this information, kindly share in the comments. Thanks!
UPDATE: Here are some performance results between the SN03 and SN04, very little difference, but SN04 has a little bit faster writes.
![Exo X16 SN03 Performance before flash](https://cdn.carlosfelic.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/image-40.png)
![Exo X16 SN04 Performance after flash](https://cdn.carlosfelic.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/image-41.png)
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