joethezombie said:

It would be interesting to find the time frame (serial number-wise) the drives were "fixed".  I'm also curious if the mechanisms are interchangeable between the housings.

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Too  busy to Google it right now but if you dig around you'll find pages that tell you how to tell mechanisms that work from ones that don't. (There's an extra digit in the part number, I believe. Unfortunately said number is on the mechanism itself, not on the enclosure, in the case of external drives.)