Yup, we have top-men that are in charge of keeping an eye on firmware, if we see a need in an update, we'll do it.

Have you been able to reach out to anyone at Seagate in their drive FA group to see if they'd be interested in you sending back samples of the failed drives?

We do have occasional talks with all hard drive manufacturers, but we can't say about what :)

I assume (mentioned in the article) they get sent back for warranty RMA.

Yes, we try to RMA all the drives that are still under warranty.