Just have a few good practices and you should really only have to buy harddrives when they fail. I have drives that are from 2008 that I only turn on when I want to go down memory lane.
Have a few copies of your data. Original, backup, offsite backup.
Backups have parity or redundancy so if a drive fails you can replace it without completely rebuilding from backup.
Not all drives are from the same batch. This one’s more up to chance but if you get a bad batch of drives they will likely fail around the same time so it’s best to get them in groups if you are buying drives in bulk.
The only thing I notice about older drives is the speed. I would say the real reason most people constantly buy new drives is capacity. I could go out and double my capacity if I just replaced all my drives with 20TB drives. I have all 8tb drives in my setup but I plan on buying 16-20TB drives when they start to fail.
Just have a few good practices and you should really only have to buy harddrives when they fail. I have drives that are from 2008 that I only turn on when I want to go down memory lane.
Have a few copies of your data. Original, backup, offsite backup.
Backups have parity or redundancy so if a drive fails you can replace it without completely rebuilding from backup.
Not all drives are from the same batch. This one’s more up to chance but if you get a bad batch of drives they will likely fail around the same time so it’s best to get them in groups if you are buying drives in bulk.
The only thing I notice about older drives is the speed. I would say the real reason most people constantly buy new drives is capacity. I could go out and double my capacity if I just replaced all my drives with 20TB drives. I have all 8tb drives in my setup but I plan on buying 16-20TB drives when they start to fail.