a couple of years prior to that era i worked for a Giant Electronics manufacturer who used WD desktop class drives in RAID and CCTV/DVR systems. we had insane corruption issues, burnout issues and so on with a large number of our devices. at the time i was running an rma shift for the product line so this was notable to me. we also had devices come in with Seagate drives, but they had been in operation much longer before they showed any issue and were from a few previous model releases. at some point the drives were "value engineered" and WD was selected. in the end they had to suck it up and put in a server class drive (something with a high duty cycle rating). once they did the fails slowed dramatically. when we went over the data it looked like all most of the failing devices were installed in 24/7 video monitoring applications, and several were installed in poorly (or not at all) ventilated spaces. after a while we put temperature tags on the inside of the chassis to get a sense of the max environmental temp (yeah, didn't work if it had been on a truck for week in transit, but at least a field tech could check).

if i had to guess, i'd say that the digital signage company was "value engineering" the system components ;) i was in industrial controls and never had a sense that the signage folks were laughing on the way to the bank...