Those were actually some of my favourite drives cost wise ... -after- the problems happened.

Turned out at least on the ones I had that it was always the outer edges of the platter that failed, so a (from 20 year old memory, may be wrong) 60Gb Death Star if carefully partitioned out to a maximum of about 58Gb ran absolutely beautifully and you could get them dirt cheap because (understandably if you weren't a crazy person like me) almost nobody wanted to touch them at that point.