Well, JFYI, in 2009 (starting 2009, last user posted a few days ago) there was the great Seagate 7200.11 Bricking Season (unrelated to quality of the actual hardware, the issues were related to firmware) that killed so many disks (most of which could be revived) that I guess noone hasn't had one or knew not someone with the issue (or heard someone talking of the matter).

By any metric a thread on an all in all "niche" technical board with almost 5,000 posts and nearly 4,700,000 views should mean that a lot of people experienced the issue:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-seagate...