I’ve been using renewed (refurbished) 8TB drives off of Ebay - SAS 8TB for $50-60 each. Not a single failure in over a year on the dozen or so drives I’m running right now. I’m running unRAID with a combination of unRAID’s native array drives (for media and “disposable” stuff) in a dual parity config, and ZFS (with snapshots replicated to a live backup on a secondary server) for important personal stuff (and backed-up off-site a few times a year).

Even if something were to perish, I have enough spares to just chuck one in and let it resilver without worrying at all. I’m content with this as a homelabber and when I’m not supplying critical service for a business, etc.

Just wish they were more affordable. The only reason for the crazy pricing is that it’s what big companies can afford to pay rather than home labbers. They’re not all that complex compared to other mass market tech.

Get a controller that works with SAS drives and buy them used and cheap from eBay. Consumer devices won’t run SAS drives on SATA controllers so they’re usually cheaper.

I refuse to believe that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, even though for most humans that bar is pretty low.

When I finally “die” I’ll no doubt get kicked back out into the real world and have to plug in another quarter.

Cave paintings aren’t video or audio. They’re pictures. You can print your photos or print grabs from your videos.

I’m a big advocate of unraid servers. Mix And match any size of drives you have available into a single large NAS with protection against drive failures. You can use old pc hardware you might have lying around. It’s commercial software but you can demo it for free. It’s good enough that I own two full pro licenses.

Storage is dirt cheap. Just add more. IT at work bugs out their eyes when I talk about adding more storage space. I have more at home than they do in the office. Lol.

I’ve been buying used 8TB HGST drives from eBay. Dirt cheap and haven’t had one fail yet.

Unraid natively supports full ZFS arrays in addition to unraid arrays since the last major release. Can mix and match both types on the same system as necessary.

All of my (easily replaceable) Plex media is native unraid arrays while my documents are all on a ZFS array on the same system with snapshots and such. It’s the perfect solution.

So you don’t know unraid has ZFS now then? Gotta keep up with the times.

And it’s worth every cent as commercial software. I bought 2 pro licenses because it’s just that good.

I get what you’re proposing but I’d respectfully suggest looking into unRAID on basically any hardware that can boot an OS.

It won’t necessarily be small and cute (though you can accomplish that if you wish), but you can make it do just about anything. I bought old enterprise hardware to run my main and backup servers on. I feel really comfortable with my data safety.

I’ve been using PIA for years for my downloading purposes, as well as having a VPN when I travel. No issues at all and completely reliable. Don’t know if I’d trust them to leak state secrets, but not an issue because I don’t have any.

VPNs are one tool to help. They’re not the end-all-be-all. If the VPN provider is reliable, they can protect your IP address and keep your internet link more secure if using public network facilities (wifi or cellular) as the VPN tunnel is (should be) encrypted.

That said, if you are using software that fails to protect your user information by defect or by design, it can still leak data at the endpoint you are using, even though your connection is (hopefully) more secure.

[edit: deleted, echo chamber here]

[edit: deleted, echo chamber here. Android good, Apple bad. Moving on and blocking this community, can’t have a reasonable conversation, just like reddit I guess].