1. It’s possible. But also could be appearing naturally.

2. Probably not. You may need to show us the SMART report.

3. Isolated cases are fine. If numbers are still growing, that’s a bad sign.

Working at higher performance will generate more noise.

The “time and power” gets you the high quality.

Your understanding is incorrect. Only DMSMR drives are not very good because the disk is managing zones like a black box. HMSMR are great because user have full control on how to write data, thus eliminating all the shortcomings.