Sorry to bribg up this old thread, but dobt have any idea for a better place to ask my question:
I have an Exos X18 SATA drive (18TB), that was much cheaper than the then-new X20 series, which is still more expensive and has no obvious (speed/reliability) over the X18 series. I successfully upgraded it from 512E to 4KN mode. Speed difference between 512E and 4KN was literally zero, except some random access test, where the 4KN results were much worse than the 512E ones, but I didnt care much about that.
Now comes my real question: after 4KN conversion, I noticed sunce 2022 October, there were newer firmwares released silently from Seagate for Exos X18: mine was shipped with "SN02" and now the download page offers "SN04".
As usual with this whole IT industry, vendors no longer consider consumers as their partners. So the whole concept of sharing detailed(!) descriptive(!) and meaningful(!) changelogs is a thing of the past nowadays. In Seagates case, there is literally no changelog section in the attached PDFs.
Now comes the billion $ question: does this version include any field-observed bug, that neccessiated a new firmware release issued to the public, that many people would benefit from, if applied to their drives? I am reluctant to go and find some spare 10+ terabytes of spare space just to backup the whole contents of this drive in order to be absolutely safe, in case the firmware update wipes the entire content of the drive. If there was some meaningful changelog, at least I could make an informed decision. But without any hints, thats quite difficult, frankly. Guess I'm just a lame homeuser, whose opinion does not matter on the large scale. On the other habd, how do people in (very) large enteprises/organizations with enormous storage implementations feel in this situation? As I'm quite confident, they dont get the super-secret changelogs from Seagate either? Or do they?