if the box lost power it took a whack with a screwdriver handle to jar things into motion and it’d be fine again.

That brings back memories :-)

We had six Sparc 1 boxes with dual Quantum Prodrive 104S disks and the advice we had from Sun engineers if they didn't spin up was to lift the pizza box half an inch off the desk and drop it. That usually got things moving again. We had plenty of other Sun boxes over the years, IPCs, IPXs, 2's, 10s etc., but it was only those Quantum drives that ever failed to spin up.