Bah!
Interesting overview.
My own experience with various overpriced vendor-specific spinners is that the mechanical components, the moving parts, are the most reliable part of a modern disc drive. By far the majority of failures I see are in the support electronics.
I speculate, after talking to the pater who was in the electronics biz for decades, that the problem is all-but dry joints in the circuit boards from new. Surface mounts should have made these a thing of the past, but I've had a board in my trembling hand where the failure was honest-to-gosh rust under a terminal that wasn't soldered at all, just held down by pressure maintained by the other connection that was soldered, so I don't know.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
