Back in the day, I had lots and lots of Tandon/WD of stepper drives and Miniscribe with stepper always failed both that share same basic rack and pinion gear actuator. That is the real reason.
Both failed same way for one reason, both did not use split lock washers and they did not use thread glue lock (loctite), with time the rack which is a rack gear with machined teeth into a square bar of alloy metal with two holes drilled through to mount rack onto slider table, there were no locating pins either to maintain alignments. Just two screws secures the rack to the slider table that slides on rails that heads is bolted onto. And there is play too when that two screws loosens up.
With time that rack block starts to slide and mis-align as pair of screw loosens up from the stepper vibrations.
In clean room you can save these by align just right when hard drive works again and tight, take one screw out and apply loctite to threaded part near the threaded end and replace the screw then torqued. Do the same with other screw.
Seagate 2 and 3 platters 5.25" drives is very very sensitive to mechanical shock because the steel rod that is the spine for bearings and spindle hub that platters mounts on is very soft metal which bends easily then platter wobbles badly. I wished they used tempered or spring steel so that will not bend.
All my computers point on never had the tandon/WD stepper, and no miniscribe either. I was early adopter of voice coil hard drives, my first one was 80MB ST1102A in 1993 in 386DX 25 machine was paid with my work money, when still a high school student. When I learned about head parking ramp technology incorporated into 3.5" drives that 2.5" normally have, I bought them at first opportunity.
Any hard drives that can't keep cool tend to fail quick due to too much heat baked into hot platters degrades the coating then wears off quickly where heads lands on and take off when HD is so hot they get stuck.
Ones are cooler hard drive by design lasted long time and did not stick. I meant cooler running hard drive by design and the ones that run hot was kept cool from forced air cooling did not stick.
I like to do failure analysis on failed stuff. Reason for this, I collect failed stuff and learn about them and I was working with places that handled lot of computer lends well to plenty of broken stuff to take apart and play with them too.
Cheers,
Great Northern aka Canada.