You're probably thinking of the Barracuda 7200.11's event-log suicide-roulette firmware bug. It was the first time I ever had to update the firmware of a fixed disk, and I remember it being a huge pain since the revised "SD1A" firmware came with a brand new bug and had to immediately updated again:
That's what I assumed the article would be about too. Happened just as I started seriously getting into PC building. Haven't trusted Seagate since.
The IBM Deskstar drives from the early 2000's are the most infamous to me. I remember having to put one in the freezer for a bit in a last ditch attempt to get one more boot out of it and copy data off before it was lost for good. Early 2000's computer hardware in general was a total nightmare at times.
Me too. I missed the 3TB debacle because my Seagate 750GBs and 1.5TBs had all croaked, so Seagate had lost me as a customer by the time the bigger drives came into my price range. Silver lining, I guess. I've had great luck with Hitachis and Toshibas.
I got bit by the Samsung Spinpoint F4EG data loss bug on two 1.5TB drives.