Wrong: actually, hard disks also have some unallocated sectors on the platters for both bad-sector replacement and firmware storage, and this is also completely

Wrong: actually, hard disks also have some unallocated sectors on the platters for both bad-sector replacement and firmware storage, and this is also completely masked out from the (S)ATA interface. Bearing in mind I don't have a proper sample - IRATEMONK does not seem to be engineered to try to persist through a hard drive firmware flash, via software or via serial/JTAG. So, if you really are actually affected by this - please save your drive for analysis! Presumably such events are very rare - seriously, when did you last update your hard drive's firmware? Except for SSDs, did you even know that you could? I wonder if the SSD version - I know one exists, I've seen the intern project to port it to the Indilinx Barefoot - tries? I'm guessing - speculation - probably not, that's the kind of thing they'd probably want to handle manually - they've definitely got the budget to keep them updated across revisions, and maybe losing persistence is probably preferable to accidental bricking exposing their RAT, although that doesn't account for the occasional fuckup - and well, thinking about it, people kind of expect hard drives to die on them on occasion, don't they? Still, a pattern of failures of a model would stick out.