My "favorite" were the OCZ Vertex 1 drives which almost certainly had issues with the firmware eating paste and overwriting some internal metadata - periodically the drives would start throwing read/write errors on swathes of LBAs, and the only way to mitigate this would be to throw the jumper on to put the drive in "recovery" mode and do a destructive firmware reflash that blew away all the contents.

And then it would work perfectly well again...for a while.