The contacts are gold, which definitely doesn't oxidize any more than solder considering it, y'know, doesn't oxidize in air at all ever. The solder doesn't really add any contact surface area, and even if it did, it makes no difference for digital signals. "Better conductivity" doesn't improve digital sigs either. And why would the contacts ever disconnect?
I can't confirm the last paragraph, but HDD manufacturers could just move the PCB closer to the chassis and/or make the contacts' springs a bit stiffer to achieve the exact same thing, which is slightly more pressure between the contacts. That's literally all you're getting here.
DON'T DO THIS, at best it'll do nothing and at worst (muuch more likely) you'll short and kill your HDD.
The whole point of contacts is that they aren't soldered, the transmit current by physical contact. There's a matching pair on the HDD chassis:
Did you enable the option that hides read posts? For some reason it also hides posts from your profile
The thing is that when you interact with the remote server directly it's not 10 api calls, it's 10 full-blown HTML webpages that have to be served to you, which are way bigger than REST API calls.