[ZeWaren]

I remember using a bunch of Seagate 7200.12 HDDs around 10-15 years ago.

After a couple years, I had multiple of them failing. Some of them were replaced by the shop I bought them at, some of them were replaced by Seagate directly. Every time, the data was lost.

At some point, when the 5th drive failed, I realized that the failure was due to a firmware issue, that could be fixed by upgrading the firmware using a TTL connection and a serial console. I did exactly that, my data was accessible again, and the drive never failed again (it's still running now).

I was very angry at Seagate and other vendors for sending replacement drives with the old firmware when it was known that the firmware would cause the problem again, while the new firmware was out and working correctly.