Every drive can fail at any moment. Even a brand new one. It is just a bit less likely than having a decade old drive fail.

If you care about your data make sure you have backups. 321rule.

Yes, you can use a "NAS" drive pretty much like any normal drive. This is an SMR drive so not even a NAS drive to begin with.

If you do not have backups pay a professional to recover it. Yes, this is wildly expensive but tinkering yourself can make recovery even more expensive or outright impossible.

You want to move your drives to your mainboard because a lot of those cheap adapters suck. Unreliable and they can buckle under load. Can be a PITA.

If there is performance to gain depends on how accurate your information is, what drives you use, and how.

i heard some people can 'wipe' the S.M.A.R.T data which will make it look like new? is it true?

Yes.

Archiving modern websites is rather tricky. There are tons of servers involved and they often run some software themself. These are black boxes that cannot be archived without direct help from the web admins. For this reason, archived sites are often broken in some minor or major way.

Without a link, it is pretty hard to help you with your specific problem.

As I said this is something they cannot deal well with.

Only to carry a few files or whatever from one PC to another. They are just too unreliable, get lost or damaged too easily and their performance almost always sucks.

Unless you have to have your data always available a single 16TB drive will work just fine. ~£200 for the drive and it also consumes 10W and not 40. Likely pretty relevant in the long run in the UK.

And when you need more storage use Unraid or mergerFS+Snapraid on Openmediavault. They both allow you to add single drives of any size to add storage capacity and parity. ZFS is great but it kinda sucks as a home user as expansion only works well when you add 6 or even 12 drives at a time. At least for now.

Get a NAS. Unless you are tech savvy and dedicated get a Synology. You can get another Synology or hook up a USB drive for backups.

To backup and manage your photos you might run Immich in a docker. Although some people also like Synology's own solution.

because I always write 100% full random data on the device before using it.

Do you mean before every use or after receiving it?

When you continuously write to a consumer SSD they will slow down for a while. They are built for short burst of writes because that is what most consumers do. For continuous fast writing you need better NAND, a better controller and better cooling.

for a very long time

Long term digital archiving is not really a solved issue. Your best bet is an active approach with multiple copies that are checked regularly.

Is this your boot drive? If so it should have been replaced by an SSD like a decade ago.

This is a bit overkill although it depends a lot on what you will use your VMs for.

I would make sure you set a TDP limit for the CPU. Some board makers totally disregard Intel guide lines and allow the CPU to pull like 200W+ continuously at full load. Limiting it to ~120W will not cost you a lot of performance but might save some power.

650W is total overkill unless you add a ton more drives. Gold PSUs are not rated below 10% load. Here they can drop to 50% or less meaning a gold 650W might consume more than a Bronce 350W unit.

I am personally not a big fan of ITX builds. You can only add a single PCIe card. And you might want to add an HBA, NIC, GPU (for transcoding), NVMe SSDs, or something else down the line. With an ITX board you can only add one. And this PC is not small anyways.

The key to keeping your data longterm is not RAID. raidisnotabackup.com Unless you run a critical server 2 drive parity with 3 total drives is total overkill.

If you are fine with a bit of downtime during recovery I would not bother with RAID at all if you only need a single drive to satisfy your storage needs. Only when you have multiple drives being able to resilver rather than restore is worth the premium. You might want to get a new drive as they do not cost that much extra and will likely live a fair bit longer so they do not cost anything extra in the long run. You might use some of those refurb drives for your backup server though.

I would not really worry about this. You can wear out an SSD but it this is an issue a normal user pretty much never encounters.

Consumer SSDs are a thing for over a decade now and I often check how much actual people use their drives as this is logged over SMART. Even rather dedicated users need about 1 decade to hit the TBW rating and this is just how much the manufacturer guarantees the drive can endure. In reality, you can expect at least 2x as much, even reports of 10x as much are nothing unheard of.

It is far, far more likely you will lose, damage, replace it with something faster or bigger long beforehand. Unless you use it eg for a high end camera to record on a daily basis.

HDD cache hardly matters these days. Latency sensitive stuff should be stored on SSDs or cached within system RAM. It is only relevant in edge cases.

If anything more cache can be a bad indicator as HDDs with a lot of it tend to be SMR drives. However, all Ironwolf (Pro) drives should be CMR.

You can get 24TB HDDs but they hardly make sense for most users. THey cost over $600 right now. A 20TB drive costs literally half as much and you can get 18TB drives for $250.

It is not even part of the spec anymore because almost nothing used it. The idea makes a bit of sense when you consider that micro HDDs were a thing for some time and newer M.2 connector is 3.3v only.

Even a soldered ("molded") connector is fine as long as it is well made. However, it can be tricky to know if it is or not. Crimped connectors seem to be of better quality on average

If it was included with your Seasonic PSU I would totally trust it.

Flash drives kinda suck. Unreliable, bad performance, easy to lose or break. Fine for moving a bit of data between devices but definitely not something I would entrust my data to longterm.

(external) SSDs in the 1TB range are so cheap that it hardly makes sense to recommend anything else. Especially for portable storage.

Just make sure it also supports optical drives. Had to learn the hard way that not all do. And USB 3.0 is not strictly necassary as optical drives rarely take advantage of it.

but I am planning on making it external with adapters and what not!

Make sure that the adapter you get supports optical drives and has an external 12V PSU.

I use an LG BH16NS55 myself. My best drive.

If it is just for this you can use pretty much any drive just make sure it supports Bluray XL although any on the market right now should do so.

Unless I am mistaken any Bluray birner can burn MDisk Blurays just fine. Unlike M Disk DVDs they do not need a special laser.