Re. hard disk fail
I've heard anecdotal reports of lots of drives failing within days or hours despite SMART never reporting any problem, including on industrial systems subject to vibrations or loud noises.
The current working hypothesis is that writing certain combinations of patterns to the drive is over time weakening the firmware storage zones in a similar way to how ZIP disks would lose their "Z" tracks on misaligned drives eventually causing a catastrophic corruption event (CCU)
The high density drives seem to be somewhat less sensitive to this but it does occur to me that it would be worth testing for this vuln on candidate drives in a RAID array to make sure it can't happen with say elevated temperature or acoustic resonances from lots of closely spaced drives.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
