The public just gets bits of second and third hand info. Last I heard there were 7 people related to the investigation had issues with their HD. Now it might be 20. If the numbers are accurate, it is hard to believe they all had hardware equipment failure. Is something like that even possible? I'd say yes, but highly improbable. I've been in IT long enough to see bad equipment batches from vendors. I haven't seen any report or heard any testimony that suggests that is the cause. One thing I haven't heard or seen mentioned is what they were doing about patching systems and virus mitigation during the time period in question. The commissioner has been pleading poverty, so I wonder if those efforts were substandard. That hasn't been used as an excuse either.
Spinning disk is so solid a technology as to be nearly “solid state.” The likelihood of an entire batch of 2.5” laptop hard disk drives going back is so infinitesimal as to be just assumed zero. I have a background in electronics and can tell you that the factories producing these parts in bulk are so sophisticated that they could catch even a micro-level flaw in a component before it left fabrication.
A few years ago, Samsung had a bad batch of memory make it on to the market. The recall was so effective that it’s being used in business and management textbooks in universities across the world as an example of extreme efficacy in product lifecycle management. Less than 1% of the batch was actually used. Most of it was stopped in transit and sent back before it made it into a consumer’s hands.
Hard disk drive failures, esp. at the controller and/or enclosure level are virtually unheard of. You’ll lose a bearing in the spindle sleeve or a read/write head before you have a catastrophic loss of data, and in those two scenarios, data is 100% recoverable.