Upgrading Firmware On An OEM Barracuda ST2000DM001–1CH164

Eric Qian

May 16, 2023 • 2 min read

Hi, you! If you’re on this page, you most likely tried to search for a tutorial on upgrading your Dell Barracuda (GrenadaBP) ST2000DM001 HDD. However, Seagate’s site falsely claims there is no update available and to ask Dell for support…

After some Google-Fu, I found the update package. The trick is to find a S/N that’s not OEM-branded. Your part number is most likely 1CH164–501, while the part number Seagate accept is 1CH164–302.

To get the update package, you can either download it from my GitHub repo or you can download it at Seagate by entering your serial number as `S1E1SETE`. The update package is around 110 megabytes, and Seagate site will allow you to download at 100kb/s. So downloading it from GitHub would be faster.

Linky to firmware + tools archive.org Mirror

The package I got was named Barracuda-GrenadaBP-CC29-CC49.zip with MD5 C922592AF41DDAD2CBD629A94053ADCF.

According to a readme file inside the archive, here’s the list of supported model #.

Barracuda (GrenadaBP)
Model PN Firmware File
ST1000DM003 1CH162 GBP1TBCC49.LOD
ST2000DM001 1CH164 GBP2TBCC29.LOD
ST3000DM001 1CH166 GBP3TBCC29.LOD

So without further ado, here’s how to update your OEM HDD. I will be presenting this in the perspective of a Windows user. If you’re using Linux, you can figure this out.

Extract all the files in the archive
Open CMD with administrator permission
cd to the directory containing “command line tools\SeaChest”
Run SeaChest_Firmware_254_1183_64s.exe --scan
Verify the model number reads ST2000DM001-1CH164, and take note of the Handle #.
Run SeaChest_Firmware_254_1183_64s.exe -d PDxxx --downloadFW PATH_TO_FW. Replace xxx with the correct handle # and replace PATH_TO_FW with the full path to the update firmware matching your model number.
If everything went smoothly, you will see

R:\Temp\Barracuda-GrenadaBP-CC29-CC49\command line tools\SeaChest>SeaChest_Firmware_254_1183_64s.exe -d PD0 --downloadFW "R:\Temp\Barracuda-GrenadaBP-CC29-CC49\firmware\GBP2TBCC29.LOD"
==========================================================================================
SeaChest_Firmware - Seagate drive utilities - NVMe Enabled
Copyright (c) 2014-2018 Seagate Technology LLC and/or its Affiliates, All Rights Reserved
SeaChest_Firmware Version: 2.5.4-1_18_3 X86_64
Build Date: Oct 18 2018
Today: Fri May 21 21:20:04 2021
==========================================================================================\\.\PhysicalDrive0 - ST2000DM001-1CH164 - Z1E333DA - ATA
.....................................................
Firmware Download successful
Firmware Download time (s): 9.43
Average time/segment (ms): 177.83
Activate Time (s): 9.37
New firmware version is CC29

Now you can run SeaChest_Firmware_254_1183_64s.exe --scan again to verify the firmware version has indeed been updated!
You’re done :)