There was actually a similar drive-bricking bug in the SMART implementation of some of Seagate's hard drives about a decade ago. Not quite as deterministic as this one, but essentially uptime-dependant. After denying it for a while, they finally fessed up once a member of the public figured out that affected drives could be unbricked by connecting over the serial debug interface and wiping the SMART log. They ended up offering firmware updates and free unbricking of affected drives at their cost including shipping to their facility. (I don't think the unbricking process was terribly easy either - the publicly-known version required booting the drive with the heads disconnected from the controller to stop it from reading the data, or it'd get stuck in an infinite loop and not respond on serial.)

I would think the typical HPE customer (e.g. us) buys servers and uses them for between 3-5 years, before buying new servers. The old (out of warranty) servers might be discarded, or might be reused as test hardware.

Oh I'm not implying it's a common bug. I was just saying that there's nothing in the description that makes it look SSD exclusive. To completely brick the drive sounds more like a controller failure. So such a bug could just as easily kill an HDD controller.

SSDs have insanely complex firmware when compared to HDDs so letting this kind of bug slip through is an easier mistake to make in their case.