So, how much of that video is "true" and how much of it is HGST covering their behinds? I'm sure that avoiding all forms of shock is a good mindset, but say I do bump a drive during installation, how "bad" is it really?
The video is intended for OEMs, since that is where most drives end up. As such, they present things as "this is what we can both do to save money for both of us". However, all of that stuff is true.
Particularly in the case of modern helium drives, if it can't be fixed by swapping the logic board or by rewriting the data on the sealed HDA, the drive is pretty much a total loss for the manufacturer.
I don't know about HGST (I only recently started an OEM arrangement with them), but another drive manufacturer once told me that if they get a drive back, their profit on that drive is gone and they've actually taken a loss on it. And a 3rd manufacturer had a warehouse full of bad HDAs that weren't worth opening and fixing at the time - you can't do it on the regular production line because it completely messes up the manufacturing workflow, and if they open a HDA that is full of fragments, it can contaminate the entire area. So the HDAs sit around waiting for end-of-production on a relevant manufacturing line, and if it makes economic sense to fix the HDAs at that point, they'll do it, otherwise it is a write-off. As an example, a manufacturing line may have been set up for a 100GB capacity drive, then ramped up to 250GB and then to 400GB. If that line closes for re-tooling for a more modern drive, it won't make economic sense to fix a bunch of dud 100GB drives.
I don't really handle drives with this level of care, and I haven't only ever had /one/ drive fail, and that was a 10-year-old SATA drive that ran pretty much 24/7 since it's original install day - but I've only ever installed 15 or so hard drives myself (I've only been doing this for a couple of years) so it's not like I have a great sample size.
One of the first disk drives I purchased new was a Data General 6061 like the one in
this picture. That was a 192MB (yup, MEGAbyte) washing-machine-sized drive in 1982. It weighed many hundreds of pounds and to get it up the 2.5 flights of stairs to the computer center, I got a bunch of students (this was at a college), un-crated it, and went Heave! Ka-bump! up each and every step. We put it in the computer room and called DG to install it. We played dumb when a bunch of stuff in it needed to be screwed back down.
Tolerances were a
lot looser in those days. I had an IBM CE (service guy) who we could
NOT get to stop smoking in the computer room. And he stubbed out his cigarettes in the disk drive cabinets! His reasoning was "You don't own it, we do" (at the time, all IBM equipment was leased).