Can Crucial Micron SSD call home for news?

Question

Not sure if this is a valid question for Stack Overflow, but I noticed something interesting in the S.M.A.R.T data for my Crucial Micron SSD. Inside the SMART data it embedded URLS warning me that my firmware was out of date:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Crucial/Micron RealSSD m4/C400
Device Model:     M4-CT512M4SSD2
Serial Number:    0000000012330912E777
LU WWN Device Id: 5 00a075 10912e777
Firmware Version: 000F
User Capacity:    512,110,190,592 bytes [512 GB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    Solid State Device
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2, ATA8-ACS T13/1699-D revision 6
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Wed Jul 31 14:28:10 2013 PDT

==> WARNING: This drive may hang after 5184 hours of power-on time:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Crucial-m4-Firmware-BSOD,14544.html
See the following web pages for firmware updates:
http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx
http://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/client-ssd#software

As you can see, somehow the SSD knew that the firmware is out of date, and even was able to point me to a Tom's Hardware article about the problem.

My question is... how was the SSD able to gather these URLs? Does it have a built-in call-home feature?

Thanks,

Answer 1

That's actually hard-coded in the smartctl utility itself. See drivedb.h:

  { "Crucial/Micron RealSSD m4/C400", // Marvell 9176, buggy or unknown firmware
    "C400-MTFDDA[ACK](064|128|256|512)MAM|" // tested with C400-MTFDDAC256MAM/0002
    "M4-CT(064|128|256|512)M4SSD[23]", // tested with M4-CT064M4SSD2/0002,
      // M4-CT064M4SSD2/0009, M4-CT256M4SSD3/000F
    "",
    "This drive may hang after 5184 hours of power-on time:\n"
    "http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Crucial-m4-Firmware-BSOD,14544.html\n"
    "See the following web pages for firmware updates:\n"
    "http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx\n"
    "http://www.micron.com/products/solid-state-storage/client-ssd#software",
    "-v 170,raw48,Grown_Failing_Block_Ct "
    "-v 171,raw48,Program_Fail_Count "
    "-v 172,raw48,Erase_Fail_Count "
    "-v 173,raw48,Wear_Leveling_Count "
    "-v 174,raw48,Unexpect_Power_Loss_Ct "
    "-v 181,raw16,Non4k_Aligned_Access "
    "-v 183,raw48,SATA_Iface_Downshift "
    "-v 189,raw48,Factory_Bad_Block_Ct "
    "-v 202,raw48,Perc_Rated_Life_Used "
    "-v 206,raw48,Write_Error_Rate"
  },

Answer 2

I would say that those were just hard-coded into the firmware, because they don't specifically say that yours is out of date - they just give the location of firmware updates. It wouldn't be too hard for them to include the URLs to their firmware sites when they produce the drive. Still interesting though, and "calling home" is definitely a possibility. I just don't think it's the case here, personally.

Also, the Tom's Hardware article is over a year and a half old, so they could've definitely still added that when they created one of the more recent batches of firmware for the drive. Your version (Firmware Version: 000F) came out in April 2012, based on a few Google searches.