I worked in platter sputtering at IBM right out of College during the Death Star period. Basically, IBM had multiple parts manufacturing and sputtering faciliti

I worked in platter sputtering at IBM right out of College during the Death Star period. Basically, IBM had multiple parts manufacturing and sputtering facilities all over the world. The best disks/heads/motors always went in to the SCSI drives and the lesser parts went in to IDE drives. SCSI drives of that period were fairly bullet proof. Desktop IDE drives, not so much. Most of the San Jose and Munich production had higher yields and were mainly for SCSI and laptop drives. So it was less faulty manufacturing runs than the parts came from lesser production facilities, usually Singapore and the Philippines. They ended up closing the sputtering plant in the Philippines as they were never able to get their test yields up high enough...