![[H]ard|Forum](/styles/hardforum/xenforo/logo_dark.png){kind=logo}
My bad--I think I extrapolated too far.Ok, finally not stuck on a phone so can wall of text you to tears...
Not sure how you got that from what I said even with all the detail I unintentionally left out while constrained to the tiny phone screen. Obviously profit is king, but for each market segment (eg: enterprise, consumer, ...) there's a price point that gets you maximum profit which isn't necessarily derived from maximum units sold. The added cost of a separate production line for minimally differentiated products such as the drives we're talking is likely not justified since the public numbers for HDD sales say that enterprise is the volume king. Some amount of artificial differentiation in the firmware is the obvious choice here if anything at all. For some time there was definitely no variation at all, then ebay re-sellers took that joy away. So a little performance ding, maybe compatibility differences (like consumer SATA drives not liking SAS controllers or port multipliers), but nothing to hit AFR/MTBF and definitely nothing that takes real effort . Those compatibility issues may just be bugs found in the enterprise firmware that don't get fixed in the consumer side.
Ok, not so wall of text... perhaps more clearly thought as I'm not on the highway trying to think while the wife drives in the rain.
I don't disagree with you that separate production lines don't make sense. Intel has really figured out that in their production and binning works very well for them, and I could see the same thing for drives. But I don't think because they share the same production line that mtbf and afr will be the same as it's not all the same quality coming off that line, hence why I think there's binning.