On 06/07/13 08:36, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:

Hi Brad.

And when we remember back at the issues (IIRC) Seagate had with the
firmwares of some of it's devices, that suddenly stopped working at some
special date...

I had 10 of those in a RAID-6 at the time. Luckily the firmware bug only 
manifested itself on a re-start of the drive, and as I probably drop 
power to the machine once a year (if that), I could drop them out of the 
array one at a time, upgrade the firmware and re-add it to the array.

A messy process to be sure, but no risk of data loss that way.