What’s more important is redundancy, as all drives fail.

What’s your replication/redundancy/backup plan look like? That’s more important than “which drive” (other than SMR/CMR), as even enterprise drives fail.

I’ve had consumer drives running 24/7 for 10 years.

Drives are a lot more robust than most people think, but they still fail at seemingly random times, so having backup is crucial.

Backup, backup, backup.

I have an (old) NAS that frankly I don’t trust to not die. Then again, anything can die, so it’s just one component of my local data replication.

I also have my server which is authoritative for all data, which is then duplicated (on schedules) to the NAS and 2 external drives, so I have 3 local copies.

All of these drives are 5+ years old except the primary data drive which is 2.

Or keep cutting until it’s long enough!

• Red Green

I like your point about power monitoring - that would be an interesting secondary method for alerting to a possible breach, if you have a consistent power-use profile.

If someone else is storing the digital copy for you, on a system you don’t control, it’s not “ownership”.