There was actually a similar drive-bricking bug in the SMART implementation of some of Seagate's hard drives about a decade ago. Not quite as deterministic as t

There was actually a similar drive-bricking bug in the SMART implementation of some of Seagate's hard drives about a decade ago. Not quite as deterministic as this one, but essentially uptime-dependant. After denying it for a while, they finally fessed up once a member of the public figured out that affected drives could be unbricked by connecting over the serial debug interface and wiping the SMART log. They ended up offering firmware updates and free unbricking of affected drives at their cost including shipping to their facility. (I don't think the unbricking process was terribly easy either - the publicly-known version required booting the drive with the heads disconnected from the controller to stop it from reading the data, or it'd get stuck in an infinite loop and not respond on serial.)