I hear you. But won't it cost more to ship it back than to
buy another (perhaps they will waive shipping on warranty).
Probably, unless they have a deal going on. My goal was to have two
working drives and one spare mech. When dealing with hardware aged in
the decades, spares are a wonderful thing.
The "disk eating drive" is also a little interesting. It doesn't do it
all the time. At first, i thought i was dealing with failing, aging
media, but after a few hours, I noticed that ONLY disks put in the
disk-eater were failing during some writes. These disks would no longer
even format correctly in the "good" drive, or even my PC. Bad phisical
sectors. But at othe times, that drive will work fine. Werid.