I could see it turning into potentially more via EU and the excuse that VPN should be nuked from orbit… Too many politicians of the mind to backdoor everything like e2e already; this is just another thorn of many.

Hopefully you are right and this is isolated.

Different groups selling different things. OpenStack still around, albeit a shell of it’s former scale

… You do realize that they still have hundreds of thousands of VMs in their OpenStack services? Those are VMs too.

Hell back in 2008 Slicehost had more than 40k VMs before Rackspace bought em.

Wait till you hear about places like AWS or Azure…

I’ve never had issues; maybe been lucky lol.

That said, they provide some amazingly detailed status about drives! Worth looking at the reports they post. Might get you insight into what to expect from the various manufacturers and models… Maybe avoid some junk drives in the process.

One of the most recent of these:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2024/

Raw statistics might help cut through a lot of bias!

Oh important note! Check to make sure any drives you’ll use are CMR, not SMR (shingled)! SMR will not function right in raid and will fail from arrays.

I’d start by noting that raid is more about availability, not backup… I suspect you already have that in mind but just in case. Ideally if you are up for learning ZFS, that is one of the most resilient raid tools out there. Most NAS and Unix or Linux OS will have support for this.

Never connect RAID disks via USB… This only causes headaches.

Avoid SATA port multipliers, these can cause problems in raid.

SAS has the most reliable and flexible options for connectivity. Used JBOD chassis, even small, can be found cheaply and will run SATA disks well.

As to cloud data, I strongly recommend BackBlaze. Many utilities can natively interact with it (API compatible with Amazon s3) and you can handle encryption on the fly with several sync options. They are one of the cheapest solutions, and storage is pretty much all they do.

With pretty much any cloud storage, look at the ingress/egress cost of your data too… That is where many can bite you unexpectedly.

Worth noting that when you get to large storage, a good organization method for your data is key so you can prune and prioritize without getting overwhelmed later… Don’t want several copies of the same thing eating cash needlessly.

Good luck! And welcome to the wonderful illness known as data hoarding!

Blackmail.

For what it’s worth, your instance name is spectacular!