Ignoring the doubters, there are plenty of cases where custom drive firmware might be useful.
I read online (probably on HN or similar) that Amazon Glacier is using drives with custom firmware that keeps them spun down to 300rpm so that more drives can fit in a rack without power and cooling concerns.
That's certainly an interesting case that certainly wasn't possible without drive manufacturers stepping up to Amazon's wishes. Being able to do custom mods like this to your own disks is pretty excellent as well.
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Ignoring the doubters, there are plenty of cases where custom drive firmware might be useful.
I read online (probably on HN or similar) that Amazon Glacier is using drives with custom firmware that keeps them spun down to 300rpm so that more drives can fit in a rack without power and cooling concerns.
That's certainly an interesting case that certainly wasn't possible without drive manufacturers stepping up to Amazon's wishes. Being able to do custom mods like this to your own disks is pretty excellent as well.