Storage Device Recommendations

Heat is what kilt ’em. I put a nice 6T Seagate in my stupid Dell and it tried to assassinate it. No case fan, cheapskates. Luckily I got all the data off via a USB dock when the Dell BIOS couldn’t see it anymore. Try that.

Do what good ol’ hvymec said, Raid (1 is fine for me) and put them in a nice fanned Akitio case.
Man they are quiet. reliable for many years, since XP.
I also endorse putting all your hard work on the cloud for backup. I do.
pCloud is cheap, especially lifetime.

I keep most all my music on SSD’s. Can’t report on thier reliability but I have multiple backups.

OP I think you don’t want a failure, correct? AND if you do, just a drive swap and let it repopulate. The system will give an error or unhealthy FAT or what ever file tracking system you use. NTFS, FAT, Novell, ec. The fact is you keep on working BUT at a reduced capacity until a repair is done. I used the older Micropolis and Maxtor drives. Seagate had some very good drives also. You have to look at the cert for the network your using. These are fast drives, 10,000 rpm. They had auto park heads and actual drive shut down upon none use. That stuff was a dip switch or two, drive ID, and GREAT cables. PTFE and silver were the best back then..

Over 50.00 usd per foot 30 years ago..

I looked for a Novell standard.. WHY? It took days to do a low level on some drives, and then the onboard bios might just kick it out and say "TO MANY ERRORS" for novell service. WHY? That standard kept my last system going for over 10 years without drive failures. 80,000 hours last I looked a few years back 2010.. That system has a magazine tape back up, I think it holds 6 or 9. Tapes for actual Backup. Been a while, I use to be Novell and MSCE certed.. 5 drive, RAID 5 setup.. OLD!!!! It used a parity drive for correction..

BUT I stress hardware base RAID not software. LOL Just so you know.. This is really old school, but darn near unbreakable. 32 bit NT server.

Pretty cool multi boot sectors for nested NOS or OS systems.. really cool..Unix, lynex (red box), Berkley Unix, Novell, NT, OS2, la te da.. I was a weird kid...:-) My fingers are hurting just thinking about those years..

Don’t cheap out on the PS or a GOOD fan system. A great case goes a LONG ways. That is on a Topaz cleaner too..

Regards

First check your external power supply. I had same issue with a G drive external that would power on but not work just made a clicking sound. A tech told me to buy an upgrade wall wort power supply and it has worked great ever since and that was 20 years ago. WD also uses very cheap power blocks to keep cost down. I would try this first even if it does not you will have an upgrade to use on new one.

Hello,
I saw something cool in my Hifi store https://holmaudio.com/ It is the Sony server HAp-Z1es. This can rip your CDs and store them in one place. It also has DSD capabilities and balanced output. The app works awesome plus other devices like streamers can access the music from this Sony player. Also if you get an external hard drive you can go crazy with the amount. Another product is the BlueSound Vault. It is a streamer and cd ripper. The Sony is a higher grade of sound and storage. So here is a really good low cost $899 and mid cost option $1999. There are higher end ones but they are out of my budget fit now. https://holmaudio.com/

Taxing a hard drive with music file access? Not a chance. Music access performs very little stress to a hard drive. When I was working in the IT sector for over 40 years, I dealt with very large databases running on million dollar storage systems and the last 10 years worked for companies that sold hard drives and solid state storage products. Most of us use personal hard drives and ssd/nvme products, not the enterprise rated products and there are big differences in quality and speed. If you want redundancy, I’ve used all the different RAID configurations, and for music, I would use a hardware RAID 5 configuration in either a 3 disk configuration, which results in faster reads but slower writes. In music and video, it’s a write once and read many times environment, perfect for RAID 5. Also, I would never use personal grade solid state storage for caching or for backups. Caching will wear out a personal grade SSD much faster because of the lack of enough overprovisioning that an enterprise SSD provides and the lack of TRIM on certain OS’s.
For my Roon database, I use a standalone 5TB drive, no RAID/no redundancy, and back it up daily to a 8TB disk. I also have another 8TB backup disk stored in a safe that every couple of months, I take my current backup disk and store it in the safe and then reuse the backup drive from the safe as my current backup. I’ve had to restore my mac a couple of times in the last 20/30 years and the backups have always worked flawlessly to restore the Mac.
I also don’t use the portable usb powered disks, I use the bigger vented external powered disks. As for SSD for music, more quiet, but also overkill. I use an SSD/nvme device for my boot drive mainly to run the Roon index structure on it for faster access, but all the TBs of music files are on an external hard drive.