Bingo. I’ve been running refurb 4tb hgst drives for years now, oldest one has 50k power on hours and I’m not sure if that’s how long I’ve run it or if it had a bunch when it came. Either way, I have yet to lose one in years of use while popping several western digital and seagate drives.
I’m moving to 10tb drives (I tend to pick the biggest sub $100 drive option when I need a new standard) since I’m out of drive bays and nearly out of space on the old garbage array. Stick to the 3-2-1 rule and these should be fine.
I’m sure the “millions lost” is their theoretical earnings they are “losing” by not being able to monetize the data they collect, spy on users to determine their habits so that they can introduce features that charge for things that are standard today, loss of ad revenue, etc.
We’ve hit a point where since everything collects as much data as they can to be mined, anything that interrupts that stream is now a felony corruption of business model.