The following process can be used to update the firmware on an Intel P3605 1.6TB U.2 NVMe drive. These drives are OEM drives that were designed specifically for Oracle and are also referred to as Oracle Flash Accelerator F160.
Flashing your SSD’s to the latest firmware is always a good idea as new firmware can have an impact on performance.
I will explain how this process is done on Unraid as that’s what I used but I will also explain how to do the same process on another Linux distribution such as Ubuntu.
The first thing you’ll want to do is download the below firmware files and place them somewhere on the server in which you’ll be flashing the firmware. If your SSD’s firmware has version RA10 or lower, you’ll need to flash to RA11 first before you flash to RA13. If your drives have version RA11 or RA12 you can flash straight to RA13. Read on to see how to check your drives’ firmware version.
8DV1RA11.bin (840 KB)
8DV1RA13.bin (948 KB)
The next thing you’ll need to do is install the NerdPack plugin from the Unraid app store. Once you’ve done this, go to Settings > NerdPack and scroll down until you find the package nvme-cli-1.11-x86_64-1_slonly.txz. Toggle the On button to the right for the package and then hit Apply at the bottom to install the package.
If using Ubuntu, you’ll need to do the following process to install nvme-cli:
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install nvme-cli
Now that we have the firmware files downloaded and nvme-cli installed, it’s time to flash the firmware. First type the following to list all your nvme devices:
nvme list
It will looks something like this:
Locate the device you’re trying to flash (ie. nvme0) and then use the following commands to flash the firmware. Be sure to change nvme0 to whichever device you’re flashing and change /mnt/disk1/ to whatever location you placed the downloaded firmware.
nvme fw-download /dev/nvme0 --fw='/mnt/disk1/8DV1RA13.bin'
nvme fw-activate /dev/nvme0 --action=1
nvme reset /dev/nvme0
*If using Ubuntu you’ll need to add sudo in front of the above 3 commands.
And that’s it. You have now successfully flashed your device’s firmware to the latest version.