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I buy consumer grade drives. I've had some fail over the years. It's inevitable no matter if you spend money on consumer grade or server grade. @NaibofTabr@infosec.pub @infosec.pub pretty much gives a succinct breakdown of the situation further down in this thread. I'm pretty fastidious about backing up my data. I've been burned a couple times, nothing earth shattering, but it's enough to do a proper 3,2,1 scenario for all data. And I treat my drives well. Each drive bay has it's own cooling fan. I keep an eye on the S.M.A.R.T status as well. But even all of that isn't going to save you from a crash.
Recently, I tried to revive a friend's 4 tb external he stored all his pictures on. He is a photographer. The first thing I asked was, where's your backup? What backup? Well, he's now got a 4 bay NAS, doing RAID, and backing up nightly in a 3,2,1 schema. It just takes once for most people.
My last HDD failed in ATA (so consumer stuff, the legendary Deathstar) era, not one in 3 home NAS systems - I'm just saying your millage can very & is luck based.
Also RAID will have more reads/writes than non-RAID systems.
I think this stuff sort of depends on how often you upgrade drives. I bought 2 4TB drives in 2015 running in a ZFS mirror, spinning 24/7 as I had heard that the hardest time on a spinning disk is the initial spin up from cold boot, or sleep. (I'm not sure is this if true anymore, but I had disabled sleep on the drives, regardless)
5 years later, I bought 2 10TB drives to upgrade my storage capacity, and relocated the 4TB mirror to media content, and stuff that was replaceable if the drives failed, so I didn't need to really back it up.
Juuust now, at the end of 2025, 1 of the initial 4 TB drives failed and now my 'old' ZFS mirror is in a degraded state running on 1 drive, but the drive that failed lasted 10 years.
I bet the average home lab or self hoster is probably upgrading and replacing their drives with higher capacity more often than 10 years, so they probably would never actually see a drive fail in real life use.
Yes, these are also exactly my thoughts (& also why it's prob fine to recommend lightly used derives - but maybe not 10 year old drives).