Any excess profit due to higher game prices will go to shareholders anyway.

IIRC, HDDs have some reserved sectors in case some go bad. But in practice, once you start having faulty sectors it’s usually a sign that the drive is dying and you should replace it ASAP.

I think if you know drive topology you can technically create partitions on platter level, but I don’t really see a reason why you’d do it. If the drive is dying you need to resilver the entire drive’s content to a new disk anyway.