A Virus written to your Hard Drives Firmware? This is scary

"All of this software is small enough to fit on the hard drive’s firmware. This means that traditional antivirus cannot detect its presence. If the owner of the system does get suspicious and completely reformats the hard drive, the malware will remain unharmed. The owner cannot even re-flash the firmware using traditional methods since the rootkit can detect this and save itself. The only way to properly re-flash the firmware would be to use an SPI programmer, which would be too technical for most users."

I'm still not sure how it would loaded on to the Hard Drive's Firmware, but if someone was intercepting your hard drive between the manufacturer and your vendor and you, they could load almost anything. And you would be none the wiser without a very specialized piece of equipment to TOTALLY format your drive and to reload from safe discs.