[GTALUG] war story in progress: NVMe drive

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

I bought a used ThinkCentre M75q tiny desktop computer through kijiji.
I upgraded the RAM and disk.
For a disk, I bought a WD Black SN770 2TB NVMe drive.

I've installed it and installed Fedora Linux on it.  All fine.

I don't know that much about management of NVME drives.  They mostly just 
work.  But I got curious about firmware updates.

- WD only supports firmware updates through Windows or MacOS!

- this machine has no Windows license (surprising but true) or 
  installation.  Less surprising, it has no MacOS license or installation.

- there seems to have been a firmware update a while back (some reddit 
  queries about it five months ago).

- My unit is probably new enough that it came with that new firmware.  How 
  to check?

- this article points to an NVMe tool for linux: 
	https://opensource.com/article/21/9/nvme-cli

- nvme-cli works and seems useful but I don't really know how to read the 
  output.  It does say "frmw      : 0x14" which might contain the required
  information.

- When I try to log in to WD support, they say that I must change my 
  password (their site must have been compromised since I last logged in).
  When I OK that, they say that they have emailed me a link but it does 
  not arrive.

How frustrating.