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TIL WD uses a firmware update format so fucked, that even binwalk can't make sense of it (literally zero stuff found by it).

And they only provide firmware updates if you're using Windows, if you're not using Windows you have to do some extremely hacky, officially undocumented stuff (https://community.frame.work/t/western-digital-drive-update-guide-without-windows-wd-dashboard/20616) to update the firmware, and even then, you have to boot from a usb drive to do so.

And in both cases, it forces you to restart your computer, when the controller itself says that it has two firmware slots and can switch between them in 5 seconds. I could do all of this right from my system, live, if only it provided me the firmware image that I can dump on the drive directly. Or even better, just uploaded it to lvfs, which could do the bidding without any effort from both sides.