Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then. WD is pretty much all good, Seagate has some good models that are comparable to WD, but they have some absolutely unforgivable ones as well.

Not every Seagate drive is bad, but nearly every chronically unreliable drive in their reports is a Seagate.

Personally, I’ve managed hundreds of drives in the last couple of decades. I won’t touch Seagate anymore due to their inconsistent reliability from model to model (and when it’s bad, it’s bad).

Why in the world does this seem to use an inaccurate depiction of the Xbox Series X expansion card for its thumbnail?

Same here. Been burned by SSD's too though - a Samsung Evo Pro drive crapped out on me just months after buying it. Was under warranty and replaced at no cost, but I still lost all my data and config/settings.

I still wonder, what's stopping vendors from producing "chonk store" devices. Slow, but reliable bulk storage SSDs.

Just in terms of physical space, you could easily fit 200 micro SD cards in a 2.5" drive, have everything replicated five times and end up with a reasonably reliable device (extremely simplified, I know).

I just want something for luke-warm storage that didn't require a datacenter and/or 500W continuous power draw.

Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then

I have.

But after personally having suffered 4 complete disk failures of WD drives in less then 3 years, it's really more like a "fool me once" situation.

I deal with large data chunks and 40TB drives are an interesting idea.... until you consider one failing

raids and arrays for these large data sets still makes more sense then all the eggs in smaller baskets

You'd still put the 40TB drives in a raid? But eventually you'll be limited by the number of bays, so larger size is better.

I guess the idea is you'd still do that, but have more data in each array. It does raise the risk of losing a lot of data, but that can be mitigated by sensible RAID design and backups. And then you save power for the same amount of storage.

Or the 8k photos of vacation dinners.

Cost. The speed of flash storage is an inherent quality and not something manufacturers are selecting for typically. I assure you if they knew how to make some sort of Super MLC they absolutely would.

i remember bragging when my computer had 40gb storage

So all the other hard drives will be cheaper now, right? Right?

It used to be pertinent to check the color of WD drives. I can't remember all of them but of the top of my head I remember Blue dying the most. They used to have black, red and maybe a green model, now they have purple and gold as well. Each was designated for certain purposes / reliability.

Source: Used to be a certified Apple/Dell/HP repair tech, so I was replacing hard drives daily.

I bought my first HDD second hand. It was advertised as 40MB. But it was 120MB. How happy was young me?

Gold is the enterprise ones. Black is enthusiast, blue is desktop, red is NAS, purple is NVR, green is external. Green you almost certainly don't want (they do their own power management), red is likely to be SMR. But otherwise they're not too different. If you saw a lot of blues failing, it's probably because the systems you supported used blue almost exclusively.

Of course, because you don't want to lose the data if one of the drives dies. And backing up that much data is painful.

Any disk can and will fail at some point in time. Backup is your best friend. Some sort of disk redundancy is your second best friend.

It's not inherent in terms of "more store=more fast".

You could absolutely take older, more established production nodes to produce higher quality, longer lasting flash storage. The limitation hardly ever is space, but heat. So putting that kind of flash storage, with intentionally slowed down controllers, into regular 2.5 or even 3.5" form factors should be possible.

Cost could be an issue because the market isn't seen as very large.

Raid 5 is becoming less viable due to the increasing rebuild times, necessitating raid 1 instead. But new drives have better iops too so maybe not as severe as predicted.