The route to the solution you find when you start a math problem knowing jack shit about the subject.

And hardware that you are willing to make suffer…

I have old 500 gb drives from 2009 that i ripped out of beaten laptops still working 24/7 and i’ve had new drives grenade themselfs two weeks in use, there are too many factors to properly gauge how long of a life a drive has, the best option is to have backups, even something as simple as a copy on a flash drive is better than nothing.

I get people saying follow the 3-2-1 rule, but there are places like mine where storage is prohibitively expensive, so just do what you can, anything is better than nothing in this cases.