Yes I have and it’s good, but I don’t think anecdotal evidence matters. I may have been lucky or you might be unlucky.

Personally I always buy multiple refurbished drives and put them in a raid in such a way that they can fail without fucking me over. For a minimal setup, mirror and throw big fat errors with sound when one is down or has smart errors or bad blocks.

Thats expensive

With a very nieche benefit. I doubt that one core can chug enough to make any significant bandwith