I suspect you're right and the firmware changes have likely covered compatibility with SATA II and missed these edge cases with legacy SATA I controllers.
That's interesting, I have a WD Black SN850 in my MNT Reform with ZFS on it and luckily haven't run into any issues with it, though I'm not stressing it in any kind of way.
WD disks and ZFS go back a long way, when the Green HDD line first showed up in the late 2000s they caused a lot of headaches since ZFS expects to be in control & have a response when issuing requests where as the Green drive's firmware would be trying to conserve power, resulting in bogus errors.
The general advice is that you should have more than 1 name server and they should be on different networks/servers, to prevent the exact issue you're suffering, that a DDoS on one network doesn't cause an entire namespace outage.
You are right to think about increasing the TTL of anything that's static and constant, like MX records. That TTL value buys time when there are issues before it is propagated to hosts that need to query your records as it's not cached at their end.
Another trick, is to have the authoritative server where you perform the updates not referenced in your domains NS records, and instead only list the secondary (replica) servers in your NS records. So you maintain control and any attack based on NS records is on the replicas, and they refetch the record from the authoritative server periodically (based on SOA record settings).
Practical File System Design:The Be File System covers the designs of other file systems briefly and goes from FFS to XFS, NTFS, EXT2 (book was written in the late 90s)
"We covered the grandfather of most modern file systems, BSD FFS; the
fast and unsafe grandchild, ext2; the odd-ball cousin, HFS; the burly nephew,
XFS; and the blue-suited distant relative, NTFS. Each of these file systems
has its own characteristics and target audiences. BSD FFS set the standard
for file systems for approximately 10 years. Linux ext2 broke all the rules
regarding safety and also blew the doors off the performance of its predeces-
sors. HFS addressed the needs of the GUI of the Macintosh although design
decisions made in 1984 seem foolhardy in our current enlightened day. The
aim of XFS is squarely on large systems offering huge disk arrays. NTFS is
a good, solid modern design that offers many interesting and sophisticated
features and fits well into the overall structure of Windows NT."
archive.org is still blocked by 2 mobile telcos https://www.blocked.org.uk/site/http://archive.org
It was blocked by more around 2019, including by Three. Had to do the same dance to get restrictions lifted so that I could visit a library, then the rep offered me a special deal on increasing my monthly data transfer quota "for streaming videos".
Despite an "unrestricted" account, I still cannot connect to tor bridges and telegram (according to OONI tests https://ooni.org/)