Small external USB boxes probably have a worse time of it because of vibrations and heat then a drive mounted in a PC tower.
They were 3.5" disks, and very generously rubber shock mounted, but they were lay-flat and there was no ventilation.
My theories have always been that either they or the bridge boards overheated. I tossed all the bridging and enclosure stuff away and added the usb cables and power adapter stash to the group of western digital mybooks I ultimately started buying instead.
the Elite was finally discontinued in 1998 after they hit an impressive 47GB.
In 1998 the largest 3.5" disks I know of were 9, maaaaaybe 18 gigs. 47 in a single disk, and all those platters and respective heads probably made it fast enough for desktop video, high end workstation, and server tasks.
The main change is that the next year, with DV video compression, the added speed of the "Elite" over a normal disk was less important. That and at around that time the idea that SCSI was definitely better than the newest ATA implementations for everything, had been thoroughly debunked.
I had a bunch of those Bigfoot drives back in the day. They are pretty cool. Still have one
I've always liked the idea of those. It sounds like the idea was basically as an upgrade for slow-big storage, which is a neat market to try to address.
I had one briefly years and years ago (like probably close to 20 years ago) that I used in a machine I got at a swap meet, but, unfortunately it was dead or dying.
I know Why(TM) but I'd love a drive tweaking those same knobs to that same kind of extreme today.
