Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

Acorn/ARM apparently did much the same thing.

It was a few years back, but after it hit ChromeOS EOL I’m pretty sure it just got some KDE distro; I don’t think I even used LXDE. Didn’t need to do much.

I was mostly using it for web browsing, forums, spreadsheets, documentation etc. Nothing particularly strenuous.

I did have one really fun time of modifying PDF engineering drawings by opening them in Libre Office Draw which it handled kinda OK.

It did get a 240GB SSD but everything else was soldered.

I got a surprising amount of use out of a similarly configured C720 as a general purpose portable machine.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

Any modern SATA SSD will still nearly max out the bus in sequential writes, delivering sequential performance ~3x that of a spinning disk and random performance, even for the cheapest of drives, at >100x a disk.

Installing windows is not generally going to be enough to fill the drive write buffer, and even if it does, they’re still going to be comparable to spinning rust. This is a problem that affects low quality (not necessarily cheap) drives, both SATA and NVME.