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.

Storage is dirt cheap. Just add more.

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.

You know what will happen? I do. Apple will leave Europe

Want side loading? Buy android. That’s your choice.

I went down the unRAID rabbit hole.

I never came back up, I’m happy here.

I’ve been buying used 8TB HGST SAS drives on eBay for $50USD each, so far no issues but I really don’t care if they die. Basically disposable at that price point.

In my (admittedly) limited experience with ZFS, it utilizes more RAM than CPU except for scrubs.

Running 2 redundant unRAID systems which mirror ZFS snapshots between systems. The main system(150TB) is the one that has all of the SMB connections to the rest of the network and allows modifications to the filesystem (with a valid login). The backup system has no public shares and exists only to replicate the main system and is just large enough to store personal documents and such.

For critical data (read: personal documents, family photos, etc), I keep an 8TB drive in a safe deposit box, and I bring it home about every 6 months to rsync all of the latest updates to it from the backup server.

For media (TV shows, Movies, music), it’s only “protected” against failure with unRAID’s array system with dual parity. I don’t bother with backups at all, because it’s very large, and all easily replaceable.

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.