Re: I may be wrong..
I cant quite figure out why HP feels the need to have a special firmware version that counts the hours of service though.
One of the reasons they put their own firmware in is to make the drive report as "HP mumblety foo blatz", so that the controller/host can nag about non-vendor drives if it wants to. Once you're there you might as well specify a few vendor-specific extensions to the error reports that all modern drives generate (and store).
I'm not surprised that for some obscure reason related to the above a signed 16-bit int got called into existence as an hours operating counter.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
