Technology

Adding to my other comment, as far as archival "replacing drives every few years." Nah. A HDD can last a decade or more. New HDDs are tanks. If you take it and store in unpowered, the only think that will take it out is the eventual corrosion from the air which will take a long ass time. Vacuum seal it and it'll last even longer.

SSDs however, pretty much have a predetermined lifespan and any cell on it can only be rewritten a specific number of times before it dies. This is why doing stuff like a full format, an old school defrag or like, certain disk check functions on an SSD, is very bad for it. It's also one hypothesis as to why Windows 11 seems to be randomly killing SSDs. If something in the system is making it do a bunch of formats and disk checks on the SSD, it will burn it out.

Also SSDs will lose data if not plugged in for a long time. The actual need a small amount of current occasionally to hold the data. Idk how often, or how long before it can lose a ton of data, but they are not like HDDs in that you can't just shuck them away forever.