Agree. Even further, pretty much everything eventually breaks, the only question is when.
I have put a lot of drives in a lot of personal computers over the last almost 30 years. I have seen many cases where a particular model of drive will have a failure rate approaching 100% at some astonishly similar ages. Several of the models had that happen within the one year warranty over the years. A couple of those were Maxtor, now owned by Seagate. Others were the actual Seagate brand, but also Hitachi and evan a couple of brands that no longer exist and I don’t recall their names.
For a while I worked in a store that did builds and the owner was always looking for the cheapest parts around. We seldom had the same model or even brand of anything for more that a few months. By then, the price of what we had went up and someone else had a cheaper model that we switched to. Because of that, I saw a lot of different brands and models. There was no one brand or model that was enough more reliable to standardize on it. We did standardize on a motherboard brand, but that was only because our warranty costs dropped like a rock when we switched to that brand. Funny, they are not even in business now.
The problem with one Maxtor model was that it wouldn’t work, period. They finally admitted that it was a known incompatibility with certain controller chips. They kept giving me fixes for weeks. None of them helped and I finally put those drives into machines with a different controller and never bought another of that model.
I specifically remember a group of Western Digital 1TB Black series that all failed about the same time period. The reason that I remember these is because of the horible time I had with tech support. First, the techs said they have never heard of the Black series and thought I was referring to the color of the drive, not the series name. That was very frightening since they didn’t even know their product line and wouldn’t research it to find out.
Another aspect of it was when I checked the warranty online and saw that it was three years, not the five that is advertised. None of the techs that I talked to would even acknowledge the five years, even though it was stated on the web site. Among other things, they absolutely insisted that I send them a photo of the drive. Since WDC policy is that the warranty period starts at the manufacture date OR the proven purchase date. Apparently they didn’t believe the model number that I was reading to them over the phone. Perhaps I am too stupid to be able to read a series of letters and numbers. Apparently I have gotten smarter than that now since I’m writing this 
It turns out that some of that model of drive had been part of a stolen shipment. Apparently it is okay to reduce the warranty on stolen drives? I bought my drives from a reputable and authorized national distributer so I knew they were not stolen, but why the warranty issue. It would have made sense if they were trying to find out who stole them, but they said they didn’t care, it was JUST a warranty issue.
We talked, no, argued for hours about it and they finally had to restore the full five years of warranty. My point is just that all manufacturers have problems.
My question about using the drive was really why not just extract the data and send the drive in for warranty since it is only a few months old. Once a drive has failed as badly as yours did, you can never trust it to be reliable.
