dvader
Adept
Hi Everyone,
Recently I migrated every last bit of my data onto my home NAS (Had it for a few years now but laziness is a b***tch) including the long-forgotten and mostly useless files stored in an external hard disk bought when I was still in college. I had a collection of 5 external HDDs (Among my family members ofc) all of them Seagates. Some of them were dying and one of them has died since then. Now I don't like to throw things if I can mend or fix them so I decided to find out if these enclosures could be reused.
All of these external HDDs were Seagate Expansions bought circa 2016 and onwards. I shucked the drives and found they used a JMicron JMS577 USB-SATA bridge/controller. These JMS577 are basically OEM JMS578 controllers (found in budget enclosures these days) and I found a way to reflash the firmware in these controllers to (noticeably) improve UASP performance, disable drive spindown to use these enclosures with RPi or PCs, get hot-swap functionality (don't know why you would need it but it's there).
There are two flash utilities available,
Note: For flashing just attach your enclosure to your PC (normally) with an HDD installed. JMS577/578/579 doesn't like to come up without a disk attached to its rear. Don't worry you won't do anything to your disk.
1. Windows: Simple and easy. However, no way to set extra options like disable spindown and enable hotswap. You will just be able to flash with default options. However this lets you see if you have a compatible controller, just attach your disk and open the utility to check your enclosure's info.
2. Linux: Odroid forums have a Linux flash utility with a full feature set however it's an Arm32 binary and as such only runs on ARM/AARCH64 Linux kernel. Which should be easy if you have an RPi or any other ARM-based SBC with Linux
Ref: https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/software/jms578_fw_update
Note that JMS577 is just OEM JMS578
You need to flash the following firmware: "JMS578-Hardkenel-Release-v173.01.00.02-20190306.bin"
There are a couple of more recent firmware but they are either marked beta or extracted from untrusted sources
Now if you have bought a SATA enclosure recently, Orico has a few good options, and most of them (at least the ones available on Amazon and PiBox, --- 25PW1-XX) have the same JMS578 controller. These enclosures have been reported to have issues with TRIM, if you face these issues just re-flash to fix.
Buying a new enclosure today: I bought a few enclosures from PiBox [M.2(SATA and NVME) and SATA] just to test the Realtek 9201R(sata), 9210 (nvme), 9210B (nvme and m.2 SATA) controllers. And damn these are way better than the current options in the market. These are awesome and have replaced my Ventoy Sandisk Pendrive with an M.2 3.2 gen2 enclosure.
Note: Attached is the Windows Flash tool, for Linux Arm32 see above.
PS: Don't forget to dump your existing firmware. And as always t*ts or firmware flash at your own risk.
Recently I migrated every last bit of my data onto my home NAS (Had it for a few years now but laziness is a b***tch) including the long-forgotten and mostly useless files stored in an external hard disk bought when I was still in college. I had a collection of 5 external HDDs (Among my family members ofc) all of them Seagates. Some of them were dying and one of them has died since then. Now I don't like to throw things if I can mend or fix them so I decided to find out if these enclosures could be reused.
All of these external HDDs were Seagate Expansions bought circa 2016 and onwards. I shucked the drives and found they used a JMicron JMS577 USB-SATA bridge/controller. These JMS577 are basically OEM JMS578 controllers (found in budget enclosures these days) and I found a way to reflash the firmware in these controllers to (noticeably) improve UASP performance, disable drive spindown to use these enclosures with RPi or PCs, get hot-swap functionality (don't know why you would need it but it's there).
There are two flash utilities available,
Note: For flashing just attach your enclosure to your PC (normally) with an HDD installed. JMS577/578/579 doesn't like to come up without a disk attached to its rear. Don't worry you won't do anything to your disk.
1. Windows: Simple and easy. However, no way to set extra options like disable spindown and enable hotswap. You will just be able to flash with default options. However this lets you see if you have a compatible controller, just attach your disk and open the utility to check your enclosure's info.
2. Linux: Odroid forums have a Linux flash utility with a full feature set however it's an Arm32 binary and as such only runs on ARM/AARCH64 Linux kernel. Which should be easy if you have an RPi or any other ARM-based SBC with Linux
Ref: https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/software/jms578_fw_update
Note that JMS577 is just OEM JMS578
You need to flash the following firmware: "JMS578-Hardkenel-Release-v173.01.00.02-20190306.bin"
There are a couple of more recent firmware but they are either marked beta or extracted from untrusted sources
Now if you have bought a SATA enclosure recently, Orico has a few good options, and most of them (at least the ones available on Amazon and PiBox, --- 25PW1-XX) have the same JMS578 controller. These enclosures have been reported to have issues with TRIM, if you face these issues just re-flash to fix.
Buying a new enclosure today: I bought a few enclosures from PiBox [M.2(SATA and NVME) and SATA] just to test the Realtek 9201R(sata), 9210 (nvme), 9210B (nvme and m.2 SATA) controllers. And damn these are way better than the current options in the market. These are awesome and have replaced my Ventoy Sandisk Pendrive with an M.2 3.2 gen2 enclosure.
Note: Attached is the Windows Flash tool, for Linux Arm32 see above.
PS: Don't forget to dump your existing firmware. And as always t*ts or firmware flash at your own risk.
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