How to upgrade SSD firmware on Intel RST RAID 0 member disk?

Question

I have a random bunch of SSDs working in an Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID 0 to serve as my system drive.

To setup an Intel RST RAID drive, in UEFI one must change the SATA controller to RAID, then enter Intel's pre-OS RST mangement area

One of these disks has a firmware update available which was given the highest update classification by the manufacturer:

Important

These firmware updates address critical bugs which improve the reliability and performance of your SSD. It is highly suggested to update your drive as this will ensure the SSD continues to operate at its optimum level.
>     ARC 100 Firmware v1.01
>     
>     Release Notes
>     
>     Improvements since v1.0
>     
>     Fixed a corner case issue with DDR corruption on 480GB capacity drives
>     Improved robustness of uncorrectable error handling
>     Improved read retry on bad block list
>     Numerous stability and reliability improvements

When I try to update the firmware using the software provided by the manufacturer, the member drive is not listed because the RAID 0 drive is what the system sees.

I use daily backups with Windows Home Server 2011, so it's quick and easy to restore my system. Still, it's not so fast that I want to remove the member disk just to update the firmware.

What are my options to upgrade the firmware?

_{Note: I am not using a Windows software-RAID. As far as Windows is concerned this is a real disk. I am using a software-RAID in a sense: the RAID controller is probably just software on a chip that came with my motherboard. Anyway, answers considering a Windows software-RAID are also interesting and welcomed.

Illustration showing that motherboard RAID appears as a normal disk at the OS level}

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 01 '15 at 05:28

The Linux Live-CD Method

One option is to boot into Linux using a live disc, and then run the firmware updater for Linux from there.

Example steps

The following is an example process of how to do this in Windows using free software.

Create a bootable USB flash drive

See the article Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive on TechNet, or follow these steps:

Open a PowerShell terminal and run diskpart.Open the terminal as an adminstrator if DiskPart doesn't elevate automatically.
Type list disk:

Disk      Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
--------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
Disk 0    Online          670 GB      0 B        *
Disk 1    Online         7728 MB      0 B

Select the USB device and clean it:

DISKPART> select disk 1
Disk 1 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> clean

Create a partition, format it and make the drive bootable:

DISKPART> create part pri
DISKPART> select part 1
DISKPART> format fs=fat32 quick
DISKPART> active
DISKPART> exit

Create the live disc.

Download Ubuntu Desktop
Burn the image file to your USB device using YUMI. Be sure to make a persistent file for storing changes.

Update firmware

It wasn’t necessary for me to disable the RAID controller in the UEFI. So simply boot into the live disc and run the update software:

Make sure your UEFI/BIOS is not set to Ultra Fast boot mode, or something similar that prevents booting from USB drives.
Boot into Linux, without installing it.
Download and run the firmware update software. If you can’t run it, make sure it's executable (i.e. sudo chmod u+x ~/Downloads/SSDGuru):
Verify the firmware was updated by rebooting into Windows or the live disc:

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:17

Casually looking at the manufacturer’s link you initially provided it seems there Windows firmware updaters available as well as Mac OS X and Linux updaters or pretty much all models of SSD from this manufacturer. And in the case of the ARC 100 model, the Linux firmware is available directly here.

Since—I assume—the RAID setup is via Windows itself, the firmware update couldn’t be applied as you expect to via Windows without breaking the RAID.

Instead I believe the best route would be to get some Linux live OS on a USB or CD or even another drive and boot from that. And then when in that Linux OS, download the Linux firmware update and handle the process from there. Within Linux you could download this from the command line in the Terminal like this:

curl -O -L http://ocz.com/consumer/download/ssd-guru/SSDGuru_1.3.1571.tar.gz

The logic being that Linux will never see the full RAID setup but it will see each of the individual drives. So you would be able to update the firmware that way, then boot into Windows and you are good to go. Ultimately a firmware update is really platform agnostic; the variety of firmware installers available are just delivery mechanisms for the underlying firmware.

Of course a procedure like this should not affect data on the SSD, but I would recommend doing a full backup before proceeding if worse comes to worse.

That said, if this is a RAID setup via Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) which is not a fully hardware RAID and not a fully software RAID but somewhere in the odd middle, then this whole concept of booting from a Linux live OS won’t work. You’d have to physically remove the SSD from the machine and place it in an external enclosure or disable the RAID in the BIOS for a firmware upgrade to work. More details on a broad level in this answer.

score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:17

The OCZ Downloads & Updates page you have cited has a download titled "PC & Mac Bootable All", with the remark of :

DMG files are used to create a bootable USB drive

The link downloads a 260 MB file named Bootable_SSDGuru_v1.3.1571.dmg.

For converting this file to a bootable USB, see this SU thread :
Create a bootable USB drive from a DMG file on Windows.

If you are using Windows soft-RAID, boot with the resulting boot-USB and update the firmware. The bootable SSDGuru does not use Windows and so should see the drives as they are.

If you are not using Windows soft-RAID, you should set the BIOS to non-RAID (ACHI) and then use SSDGuru. If you cannot do that with your BIOS, you will need to move the disk to where it can be used as stand-alone.

Ensure first that you have the necessary media to reinstall your current firmware, just in case.

score 2 · Answer 4 · edited Oct 28 '15 at 16:48

You cannot directly update the firmware when the drive is part of an Intel RST RAID array.

If you want to update the firmware on a drive that is a part of such a RAID array, you must do one of the following:

Shut down the machine, remove the disk, and connect it to a non-RAID port in another computer to perform the update.
Or shut down the machine, disable RAID in the BIOS, boot from a USB/CD/external hard disk drive and run the update from there. Once done, re-enable RAID in the BIOS.
Or if your computer has non-RAID ports, shift the disk over to one of those, and then run the update from a USB/CD/external hard disk drive.