One of my external hard drives (14tb WD) started making weird “purring/scratching” noises lately. Luckily, I have it cloned on another larger 18tb drive. How does hard drive warranty work, should this guy fail? I suppose you send it back to them for replacement, but how can you trust them with whatever data is on your failed drive, if somehow they can still access it? I’m sure techs have better to do than just copy everyone’s stuff, but even out of principle, I’m concerned.
It’s a good idea to keep your important data where privacy matters separate from all the other stuff you collect. E.g. keep your documents and private photos and their backups on separate (smaller, cheaper to replace) devices. In worst case you can sacrifice.
Keep the less important data that needs all the space (erm. those Linux ISOs) on the larger expensive disks. If you send those in, in case a replacement is required, then it probably won’t matter too much if someone must snoop over it (unless it’s too much of the dirty Linux ISOs) :)
Aka have clear device-level separations between any sort of media collections and your critical data.