I think it's sad that the hacker/maker community doesn't have enough knowledge/skill/inclination to disassemble this kind of thing and figure it out for themselves.

It's a bad sign when tech complexity gets out of the expertise of a hobbyist - I believe that's the start of a stagnation of that technology as new young engineers never get excited about disassembling and modding hard drives in their free time, and in turn it becomes paid engineers only who, I suspect, are less innovative.

When was the last time you heard someone who had modded their hard drive to, for example, seek faster?

The technical answer of what part failed and why is only a small part of the overall answer, though.

For example, with the Challenger explosion, it's O-rings vs. the culture and organizational deficits that led to: the O-rings, failure to revise the seal structure despite evidence of problems on prior launches, and the final decision to launch Challenger.

All of that is arguably the most interesting part.

Equipment cost is a huge problem there. You need a proper clean room if you're going to tear apart HDDs and expect them to work again when you reassemble them. Not to mention, the extremely precise tolerances involved would make mechanical mods a tall order indeed.

Firmware mods would be more doable, assuming it isn't locked down.

WDs tend to be a bit more durable... especially in smaller capacities:

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2021-05-09/poor-disk-perfor...

If you want to give it a go, I've still got a bunch of these drives lying around. We also have some still running in our zpool which I would gladly replace with something else, we're running out of space yet again... ;)

haha, it's even better if you replace in your comment hard drives with CPUs

But people do mod CPU's... By overclocking, by hacking into SMM mode, by liquid nitrogen cooling...

People also make their own toy CPU's for fun with quite some regularity - using FPGA's and other tools, the same as the pros.

And people decap and reverse engineer new CPU's like Apples M1.

And people do hack hard drives as well:

* install Linux to your hard drive firmware

https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

The difference is, these hacks we've mentioned are software and solid-state electronics hack. On the other hand, doing a hard drive failure analysis in the mechanical realm is totally a different challenge, a hard drive is hard.

I think I missed something in my comment, because I focused more on processor fab