Any more special treatment than they give AWS, GCP or Azure? I feel they just manufacture them all the same because there's no point in doing anyone any favors.
Every drive must go through a series of tests before it is judged suitable for sale to the consumer. Drives that fall below a certain threshold are judged 'failed' but there can be a variety of drives that fall within the 'passed' range. Some are just barely above the threshold, others are way above.
It is kind of like binning for CPUs. The very best ones can have their base clocks increased and sold at a premium. The same kind of differentiation could be done for hard drives.
They also definitely did a binning process where all drives being sold to certain manufacturers would be heavily tested for certain types of failure modes and only those that passed the most rigorous tests in a certain area would be approved to be sold to certain manufacturers.
Of course, each manufacturer had their own things that they were concerned about.
I don't know if they still do binning today, but they certainly did it back in 1989.