I managed to brick an Intel 320 last week. Going to see if they’ll replace it under warranty - those devices were upgraded to a 5 years so it should still be covered.

(Apparently the drive really didn’t like being issued with an 'hdparm --security-set-pass X /dev/sdb' command. I was intending to do a secure wipe, for which the password setting is a pre-requisite, but the drive never came back from setting the password. After that it just returned junk data to any command, including 'hdparm -I /dev/sdb' & failed the power-on BIOS SMART test.)