If it doesn't hurt me to choose a different brand or a different model line, the more relevant question becomes "Is there sufficient reason to believe that a drive with 'bad sectors coming off the line' doesn't have a higher actual failure rate?" It's better to be safe than sorry, as they say, and my experience is that once a drive starts degrading, it keeps degrading.

The reason CPUs can often be sold at a lower capacity than originally intended without worrying about an increased likelihood of later failure is because transistors are discrete devices; if half of them fail, as long as the rest can still be accessed, you just have a CPU with the same architecture and half the transistors. On a hard drive, however, permanently hosed sectors represent actual problems on part of a single discrete device -- the hard drive platter -- and it's entirely possible that the rest of the device may be affected by this. Magnetic areas on a platter are quite so distinctly segregated as transistors on a chip.

> Marking something 'enterprise' grade is often a placebo and has more to do with service, contracts and well-marketed expectations than with actual differences in the goods involved.

True -- but when you explicitly use drives that have failed the quality control required for "enterprise" drives as your retail consumer grade drives, that kinda changes the landscape a bit.