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wmf

Obligatory reminder that there are only three hard disk vendors and all of them have made bad drives at one time.

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To be specific: Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital.

What about Samsung?

Seagate took over Samsungs HDD department in 2011: https://www.seagate.com/news/news-archive/seagate-completes-...

What about OWC?

Are they all repackaged from those 3?

Do they even pretend to make hard drives? Not in their shop at least: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/3.5-SerialATA. Perhaps they do produce their own SSD's, as do many companies, since that's trivial in comparison. Definitely not hard drives, though.

I didn't know SSDs were easier trivial to build compared to HDD, I suspected it for a bit after reading your original comment.

So that explains why only 3 companies make HDDs.

SSDs are essentially just some chips (controller, flash memory, and often some DRAM cache) wired together, whereas mechanical drives have many moving parts operating within microscopic tolerances.

For SSDs the hard part is the controller and NAND and there are only a half-dozen companies making those parts. 90% of SSD brands are the same Phison controllers under the hood.

Only Seagate has shipped firmware that bricks an entire drive.

Have you got a link to back this up/allow the curious to read up on it without having to search?

It's so well-known that I wonder about your intentions, but just in case...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Barracuda#Firmware_bug

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Barracuda#Firmware_bug...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419342

...and then there's this one which is infamous enough to have its own Wikipedia page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27419072

I don't think I've seen something this bad since the IBM DeathStars.

Hey, those were fixable if you ran a UART to the jumpers, if this is the right one. Not entirely a brick!

Also, firmware mistake = disk disappears from the bus is pretty common in enterprise SSD land. HPE did it twice, I've seen it on Intel drives, and I'm sure there are others I'm not remembering. Maybe Seagate was trying to be more enterprise... and at least their drives only failed to start up IIRC, if you were running them continuously it was fine (unlike the SSDs)

I don't recall the vendor that Dell used, might have been intel, but I had NVMe drives that would displace clocks for half the connector on reboot unless you did a full powercycle...

Only certain models supported the fix via UART.

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