Well, I decided to take the top off and watch how this thing operated. 

Suffice to say, I now know why these drives were so unreliable. Sometimes when you eject the disk, it does NOT bring the heads all the way back home. So when you swing the lever over, it "drags" the heads across a still-disk before locking into place to allow an eject. 

Well this will eventually destroy the heads over time. Or at least, knock them out of tolerance. 

Oh and of course, dragging across the media will destroy the media over time as well. Bad sectors. 

There ya go.