UTC but 12 hour time? That doesn’t make any sense

Note that for HDDs, it doesn’t matter if they’re powered or not. The platter is not “energized” or refreshed during operation like an SSD is. Your best bet is to have some kind of parity to identify and repair those bad bits.

Sorry dude, but bit rot is a very real thing on HDDs. They’re magnetic media, which degrades over time. If you leave a disk cold for 2-5 years, there’s a very good chance you’ll get some bad sectors. SSDs aren’t immune from bit rot, but that’s not through quantum tunneling - not any more than your CPU is affected by it at least.

I think these were final, retail versions that were being prepared for physical distribution ahead of release

Idk, Parkside is solid, it’s impressive value. It’s inexpensive, but not cheap