I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
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.