NAS drives are the "shut up about your disk being slow, your gigabit is even slower" category (back when they were introduced most NASes couldn't even fill up the gigabit, if they had it at all). That is if anyone asks how they're different from the "DAS" and "Server" category. That somehow the marketing was so successful that now they're considered superior to the others is another story.

What else should I consider to make an educated decision?

At first what you want to do with them? Do you want blazing fast network access for video editing? Do you want to run a Plex server? Nextcloud? Synology Photos (or anything else Synology offers for sync or something else)? Or photoprism/immich or similar? And so on ...

Will rot away on anything, use or no use, at least in this universe. It's called entropy. Have multiple copies, check them periodically and refresh as they die.

Back up as soon as possible everything you care about from there, starting with the small stuff. Then next time when you have "some important data" have multiple copies of it and check them periodically.

What are the emails precisely saying? Anyway, just put rclone on it and start downloading.

Yea, I don't get this "race to the impossibly worse format". There were (even multiple) posts about saving wikipedia to pdf, I mean what for? The result will be impossibly larger and harder to use in any way as far as finding the article you want and navigating around, plus the format itself is just bad without reflow for reading on anything else except precisely one device of a certain (display/window) size and resolution.

You can get it with adb on non-rooted android: https://gist.github.com/ctrl-freak/24ac0e61b7cf550a6945

I've read that there is 1 (or 2) parity drives, but does this mean that these drives always spin up with everything you do? Wouldn't that shorten its lifespan significantly compared to a SHR configuration?

SHR is mdadm RAID. It means:

• you can lose more data than the drives you've lost
• you MUST to spin up ALL drives for mostly everything
• you need all the disks as well in some kind of service recovery situation (like for example you still have all the disks fine but your box died, you need all 8 or whatever number of disks to be connected to do anything, can't just take one disk and use the data from there)

If you WANT to spin all drives all the time with unraid of course you CAN do that, but otherwise you CAN spin up only the one from where you read (or the one you write to + the parity). That is of course an advantage, you can do as you wish.

Use rclone. If the service doesn't support it then it isn't worth it, even for free. There is no point wasting time discussing and inferring the behaviour of some opaque system you don't know what it does and most likely it doesn't do what it says on the tin.

I bought last time DVDs in August of 2007 and CDs way earlier. They still work whenever I need one (and I'll probably never get to use them all). Write, verify, move along.

Try wget.

Is this from a region where "Damaged" has another meaning than the usual one?