Just bear in mind that nothing involved in “refurbishing” a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn’t tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.
If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won’t be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.
That’s fair. I guess I question how vague an objective can be and still count as policy. He has no real idea about who it should apply to. We all know that what he really means is “anyone with non-caucasion facial features or skinner darker than his”, but he would need something a little less subjective if he were to implement it.