2x hard drive corruption after BIOS update

Yesterday I allowed Dell Command Update to perform two firmware updates, at least one marked critical.

They were:

Dell Precision 3590/3591 and Latitude 5550 System BIOS   11/18/2024  1.9.0
Dell ControlValut3 Plus Driver and Firmware              11/1/2024   6.0.47.93

After the computer restarted I found my external drives connected via USB were missing. This has happened before so I power cycled them. They then appeared but both reported no data and asked to format.

This was 12TB data, one  8TB 3.5" mechanical drive and one 4TB 2.5" SSD both connected to a USB 3 dock and directly connected to the Dell Precision laptop via USB-C port.

I was able to recover the SSD data by running chkdsk. The mechanical drive never recovered. Running a partition recovery tool I can see the files and folders scattered and mixed around but mostly present, but the partition is no longer readable.

I also have  Dell power/usb/video dock device, which appeared to be firmware updated at the same time, however the drives were not connected to that device.

Question is, what happened and how to prevent this occurring again?  I find it hard to be a coincidence that two dissimilar drives connected to the laptop should become corrupted immediately after a BIOS update.