I decided to employ this tactic when I was setting up my new NAS and needed two drives.
Upside was that I could definitely know they weren't from the same batch.
Downside was that I had to buy a Seagate, and I don't have good experiences with Seagate since my only Seagate drive had died an early death at the tender age of 3. Turns out that this was very much a downside since the Seagate drive died at the tender age of 16 months.
I had a series of WD drives that failed, and I managed to get them all replaced under warranty since they died within 3-5 years. I don't buy WD drives anymore but it wasn't the end of the world since I had spares while I waited for the replacement drives to be shipped.
Anecdotally, I haven't had issues with Seagate but I'm sure it really boils down to which exact drives you're using and what batch they were in.
I had a series of WD drives that failed, and I managed to get them all replaced under warranty since they died within 3-5 years.
I find hard drive warranties to be mostly an illusion. It's better now that full disk encryption is becoming better supported and potentially available on personal devices and not just corporate ones managed by IT professionals. However until recently the number of drives I've had in any personal/home system that I would have returned under warranty instead of securely destroying to prevent the risk of data leakage was zero. The number of phones I have ever traded in is similarly zero. It's horribly wasteful but until there are cast iron guarantees that all the private data we keep on these devices is going to be securely deleted it's the only sane policy IMHO (apart from never using these devices for anything remotely sensitive in the first place but that's all but impossible in modern society).
All of my drives have FDE. I wouldn't have shipped the drives if that wasn't the case (also luckily the issue was that writes only failed on part of the disk so I could wipe the luks metadata section).
Upside was that I could definitely know they weren't from the same batch.
Downside was that I had to buy a Seagate, and I don't have good experiences with Seagate since my only Seagate drive had died an early death at the tender age of 3. Turns out that this was very much a downside since the Seagate drive died at the tender age of 16 months.