My X360SAM experience:
I used a floppy disk. I was upgrading from 3.0 to 3.2. First of all, it was failing to make the Backups directory, because it is already included in the download and was already on the disk. Some noobs might get scared when they see "MKDIR BACKUPS FAILED" I knew it was nothing, and continued on. Everything worked fine and very quickly, great job Exobex. I sucessfully upgraded to 3.2 without booting back into Windows. Here are my timings:
Entire SAMREAD process (fw dump and X360SAM) : 2 minutes, 18 seconds
Entire SAMHACK process (fw write): 1 minute, 16 seconds
X360SAM alone (time started after fw dump reaches 100%) : 24.08 seconds
Very fast!
In all, takes less than five minutes to read, power cycle, and write. All in dos too.
A note: Do NOT use a floppy for multiple drives. Use 1 floppy per drive. I ran out of space on the second drive, during the X360SAM process. Received a "runtime error 101 at 0000:0A49." The orig.bin was fine, but the hacked.bin only got to 38,400 bytes. Floppies just don't have too much free space after putting the dos files on there.
All in all, a great update Exobex.